Soon, I’ll get my thoughts sorted out and write about my time in Bangladesh, but that may be a few weeks from now.

But here’s one quick musing:

“Often you give away the best gifts“

This was shared by one of the students on our team, right before presenting a gift that the students prepared for the staff. Prior to this, a gift that we had given to our placement hosts and the BSFB staff were “gratitude journals”, based off this idea. We wrote memories and words of encouragement scattered throughout the pages, and presented them at our goodbye party. This was an idea I found online, and I was the one who was in charge of bringing it to completion. Little did I know that the students really loved this idea, so much so that they replicated it, and got journals for each of the IVCF staff, and each wrote scattered messages throughout the books. Even though, I know part of the point of the journal, is that you “discover” these messages as you use the book, but I, and imagine the other staff as well, flipped through the journal and found all the messages and read them. For me, especially, as the originator of the host gift journals (and right up until the time we presented them, felt like maybe it was a bad idea and the students/hosts would not like it); it meant a lot to me to see the students replicate this idea. I also was struck as I read their messages by the ways they had seen and appreciated things I wasn’t sure they had noticed about how I lead and how deeply I care for them and for the Bengali people. Often life as a campus minister is hard, and you rarely get appreciated for the hard work that you do, so in rare instances like this, it means a lot of to see that students see and understand Jesus better because they see how His love shaped you and called you to model that for others.