The unexpected joys
I originally meant to write a post where I counted the costs of this year, and to be fair there’s been a lot:
– My heart has been significantly broken by students choosing fear instead of faith; anger instead of love; apathy instead of care; earthly comfort instead of heavenly riches
– I’ve taken a lot of risks that haven’t yielded good rewards
– I’ve seen ministry visions begin to be fulfilled last year and then come crashing down this year
But, as I sat huddled in RA’s dorm room with my other student leaders : Patchy, Pink, Swift, AP (obviously not their real names), I was filled with love as they sat in some hard scripture teaching, and called out sinful patterns in their own lives and in our community. I had hope as the Spirit led and convicted them, and I’m really hopeful for how we’ll pursue community and ministry going forward.
I’m grateful that we have an office on campus. And we are recommitting to using it. I’m grateful that we have an “in” at residence and we can reach an unreached group of people. I’m grateful that grad students like AP are making sacrificial time commitments that lead them to witness and bring glory to God to other grad students and faculty.
I’m grateful for this ministry, and yet I long for more: more students reached, more lives transformed and more new commitments to Christ.
But things are growing, and I have hope.
2014 Annual Report
Here’s a few ministry highlights of 2014! Check back here for more photos and extras about these and other stories!
Students say the #best things
In April, the students found out my staff partner Dan would not be working at Ryerson in the fall. I asked the student leaders if they would put together a goodbye package for him. Little did I know, they had already something in the works, a goodbye package for him and a thank you package for me, which included personal notes and sentimental photos from a variety of students from our community. Here are a few of the #best messages I received:
“It was actually a tough year. A lot of that is thanks to you. You have challenged me in ways that I am not used to. And I have done a lot of
things that have made me uncomfortable. Things like leading a Bible Study or evangelizing to total strangers. You have also shown me that being uncomfortable is good. You have shown me that we haven’t been called to comfort, but to commitment. Through the strangeness of the past school year, I’ve grown. I am deeply grateful for the ways that you have helped me grow spiritually. I’m looking forward to next year. I’m looking forward to you challenging me more. And I’m looking forward to more tough conversations over black coffee.” – N, 4th year Engineering student
A message from Lauren (Right in the photo)
“I have enjoyed very much helping with cooking group. Thank you for inviting me and accepting me with open arms. I think it was me who was more unsure about whether or not I would be accepted for not being a Christian. However, IVCF Ryerson has been about reaching out to others in the community, making people feel a part of something and gain an understanding of each other. Thank you for letting me be part of it. Through conversations at community movies and dinners, bible study and prayer group have helped me understand your point of view too. It has been an amazing experience.” – D, Food and Nutrition alumnus (Left in the above photograph)
A message from Laura, one of my current student leaders.
2013 Highlights
Here is this year’s annual report. Enjoy!
Salted cookies, secret giving and sowing seeds
…are just some of the fruits of this fall’s Manuscript study.
We have spent this fall studying Matthew 5-7, the Sermon on the Mount, and this year we (my staff partner and our student Ieadership team) hoped to see students more actively living out the application of the Scripture.
So we thought through how we could apply the Scripture with a combination of thought provoking questions, simple illustrative activities, and tangible take-home challenges. Here’s a quick summary:
week one: We wrote out the Beatitudes in our own words.
week two: During our study we invited students to have a piece of gum that lost its flavour quickly. Then we gave the students a salted chocolate cookie which they ate and found delicious, after which we gave them a second cookie to give away (and left it open to see how they would go about doing that).
week three: We gave each person a plastic plate and invited them to write with a marker a word or phrase to represent something they needed to release to God. Then had them dip their plate in a bowl of water and as it washed away see it as a symbol of God’s forgiveness.
week four: We discussed what it would look like if we actually followed through with the words that we say and the good intentions that we have.
week five: We engaged in a prayer mapping activity to help us love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us.
week six: We encouraged students to “give in secret” by choosing to give and serve sacrificially.
week seven: Using the Lord’s Prayer, as a model, we spent some time interceding for each other and the campus.
week eight: We sent the students out to try a new prayer practice to help release anxiety.
week nine: After studying about not judging others, we spent some time reflecting on places where we have been too judgmental and working through the next steps toward repentance and where possible making restitution.
week nine: Through a different prayer mapping activity, we invited students to map out an answered prayer, making note of whether or not God answered in the ways we expected. Then we invited them to ASK God for something big, holding it open-handed to the ways God may answer it or in the timing He takes to do so.
week ten: After spending some time reviewing all the ways God has spoken to us through this sermon, we sent the students out with a packet of herb seeds so that they could grow in their understanding of how things grow (and better understand Jesus’ use of growing imagery) and also bless others with the herbs they grow, so that the impact of our study group goes beyond those participating in the study.
There are so many stories to share about how God has been working in the lives of these students who have gathered to study scripture with us, but here are just a handful:
• a student who is brand new to our community chose to: share the gospel for the first time to a stranger on the GO train (after giving that person a cookie), give his time sacrificially to serve his church, invite his friends to come to bible study, learn how to lead a manuscript study and co-led a study with me, and be actively involved in our community even though he has a long commute home!
• In fact, I found out in week seven, that half of the students who regularly attended our tuesday study chose to stay on campus for the study even though their classes ended hours earlier and they would then commute home to Pickering, Brampton, Scarborough, Markham or Mimico after the study during rush hour!
• Two students would come downtown just for the study (from Mimico and Markham) on days they didn’t need to come downtown for class! One of these students told me, ‘well, I would come downtown for a two-hour class, so I’m willing to come downtown for this’.
• And there have been so many encouraging stories of how the students have been actively choosing to love and serve their friends, family, roommates, and classmates in sacrificial ways coming out of choosing to apply this Scripture! Praise God!
Mirrors
The song that Fiona and I would spend time listening to in our room was Justin Timberlake’s Mirrors. It had become one of my new summer jams, and I was pleased to find out Fiona liked it too, and had it on her phone. On days where we needed to recharge and have a bit of a room dance party, we’d put this song on.
One of the lines repeated in the song is, “It’s like you’re my mirror, my mirror staring back at me”. I found this happened more than once with the students on the GUP. I would hear them vulnerably bear their souls, and name their fears and places where they lacked hope; and couldn’t see the thing that God was doing or was offering them. And so, with boldness and more than a little trepidation, I shared my own stories. The ones that I was nowhere near done processing, and ones that I still questioned God about. Ones that I would more than willingly share, when I felt more resolution about the state they were in. But there I found myself, sharing these unprocessed, unfinished stories and in doing so, did the thing they haven’t always clearly done for me; give hope. The hope that God works in mysterious ways in the midst of our unfinished stories. Sharing these stories of struggle and pain helped me see that 1, they are still not resolved, and 2, God still wants to use those stories, even when they are unfinished. And, the things you don’t want to deal with, and stories you wish were finished, are the very ones that follow you places, and stare back at you, and its up to you how you respond.
Fiona and !
Quick musings on the life of a Campus Minister
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.
Summertime reflections
The next couple posts will detail some of the exciting stories from the fall, but before I get there, here are a few of my Summertime reflections:
After a semester full of new vision and ministry; and a rapidly growing community; I spent the summer resting, planning for the upcoming year and embarking on adventures!
I started the summer a little hectically, as I quickly bid farewell to the interns, and packed up my room to make space for the Toronto Urban Partnership to inhabit our house during the month of May. While my house was occupied in May, I was in Bangladesh with 3 Ryerson students and 11 other students from Queens, McMaster, Western, Waterloo and Ottawa University. I had a blast with this fun group of students and an amazing staff team, and though Bangladesh wasn’t quite what I thought it would be, it definitely left an impression on me, and I came back changed!
After Bangladesh, I hit the road on the Greyhound and spent 6 days in rural Pennsylvania setting up and standing in my best friend’s wedding! It was a hoot, and I learned a whole new set of life skills, as I encountered “roughing it” in ways that were vastly different than my “roughing it” experiences in Bangladesh! After the wedding, I hopped on the bus and went down to Florida to visit with Sasha before she headed out to Kolkata on a Global Urban Trek. I remained in Orlando for a few days and rested and met up with friends; then headed to North Carolina for the Wild Goose Festival! An experience like no other, I enjoyed the time there and found rest in God despite the lack of many of my usual comforts. After the Wild Goose festival, I headed to Washington for a few days, and caught up with my good friend Crystel and was cared for well by her and her family. After being on the road for 3 weeks, it was nice to have South Asian parents take care of me. After Washington, I slowly made my way back to Toronto, to embark on the next new thing.
The next new thing being my household being filled with new housemates, we welcome Dan and Joy in at the end of July (Sara moved in while I was in Bangladesh). The rest of July was spent sorting out new household rhythms and planning for the new year of ministry with my new staff team and my new exec leaders. The new exec consisted of 4 women that I had invested in over the past year, Lauren, Bethany, Amber and Sandra; I was excited to see how they would work together and the vision they brought to ministry on campus! We met as an exec team a number of times over the months of July and August; first at Dan’s parent’s cottage and later at our house. There were a lot of great ideas and new vision for the ministries we would pursue this year.
All of the GTA campuses made a commitment to have the Gospel of Luke be the main teaching text for the year, so there would be an excitement building as students prepared for Urbana (where Luke would be taught) as well as so there would be consistency as we did GTA wide ministry and conferences. The exec students were excited about this possibility, and coming out of bible study of Luke, we wanted to model how we engaged people and relationships after Jesus’ interactions as well as pursue issues of justice as an expression of our faith and from these desires we shaped ministry for the upcoming year.
A few more oldies but goodies
Didn’t you love the stories in that last post? Well here are some more awesome stories from campus from January 2012-April 2012.
New Vision for the New Year
Coming out of my winter travels and reflections about the fall term of ministry; I met with the student leaders to vision for the winter semester. Upon reflection of how the fall term landed, I saw that we were offering some really good things to the campus; but we needed to have our ministries more cohesive and try connecting some together; and rather than promoting events on an individual basis, making sure some ministries were promoting for others that were connected or reached people at the same stage or the next one. I also saw the need to build on some of our graphics and iconography and connect our ministries to our Join the Party theme. I also hoped we would try some more visibility experiments and try engaging the campus in service around stressful times for students; one idea was to do a cookie outreach, where we’d make and package cookies and then hand them out on campus to students studying for midterms.
Highlights from the ministries:
COOKING
We saw new vision and direction draw in new students to our Cooking Ministry, as we moved away from using Cooking with Bible; and instead drew our themes and recipes around cultural holidays and festivals and shared how they connected with our faith. We celebrated: Martin Luther King Day, Chinese New Year, Valentine’s Day, Holi, Hungarian Revolution Day and Passover. It was fun and exciting spending time exposing students to some of the lesser known holidays and engaging them in conversation as we discussed the meaning behind these days and what they meant to us. It was also great to have members from our community and from the larger GTA community offer insights and recipes.
COOKIE OUTREACH
Picture this scene: Every flat surface on the first floor covered with cookies, sprinkles, baggies and twist ties! The oven timer going off every ten minutes, and students taking a break from exams to roll, shape, bake and decorate 400 cookies! After baking and assembling the cookies in packages with a flyer about the Cooking Group and our upcoming movie night; we broke off into pairs and delivered the cookies on campus. One of the highlights of this experience was being paired up with Michelle*, who when I asked if she’s done anything like this before admitted she hadn’t, and when asked how she felt she was bursting at the seams with excitement! It was a lot of fun delivering cookies with her as she boldly approached people and was unflappable when people rejected the free cookies. We had a lot of fun as we received a wide range of responses; some of delight and surprise; some of wariness and suspicion. The parallels to evangelism were many and clear; the people we didn’t expect to receive the cookies did, and the ones we thought would did not.
MOVIE MINISTRY
We gathered 3 times to watch and discuss movies this semester. We kicked off the semester with X-Men First Class, which drew 3 times as many people as our last movie outreach! We followed the movie with a discussion about good and evil, and how each person has a measure of both within them and how we must strive to allow the good to flourish. For our next movie night, we decided to minister strategically to the single people on our campus by having a Valentine’s movie night, where we showed The Help. We chose that as it was a heartwarming and funny movie, but also strayed from the stereotypical notion that romantic love is the single most important love that exists and one’s life is drab and meaningless without it. We spent some time in lively discussion talking about how love, which is beyond the simple romantic love, is powerful and can cross cultural, ethnic, and societal barriers then and now and how we should strive to allow love to move us to action and overcome the oppressive powers of our fallen world. Men and women who attended the evening left inspired, and we welcomed some new faces into our community, including Dee* who is one of Lauren’s fellow nutrition classmates who doesn’t know the Lord, who first came out to help make and bake cookies for our outreach, and who enjoys spending time with our community as we are a group of people who don’t complain all the time! On our last movie night we watched Outsourced and had an engaging discussion about what it means to cross cultures and how we need to engage people of different cultures to receive the good things of other cultures and share the good things of our own.
PRAYER
We spent some time praying in different strategic places on our campus this semester. We spent January in the Ted Rogers School of Business; February in the new Maple Leaf Gardens Loblaws; and March in the Student C ampus Centre. It was exciting as we focused on doing flash prayers for people, and watching as God answered these prayers in exciting ways! We also spent some time going through the book of Common Prayer, it was fun introducing students to liturgical prayer and seeing them grow to be fond of it!
JOHN MANUSCRIPT BIBLE STUDY
We continued in the book of John, as Jenna and I lead the students through the rest of the gospel. We had fun leading as we tried different approaches with some meditative studies and some dramatic performances of Scripture! One exercise that really hit home for students is when we gave students a piece of scripture and asked them to insert their names in place of the disciples or the Pharisees; and as the students saw how it changed how they understood the passage, they began to see the ways they truly were similar to the disciples or the Pharisees and how desperately they needed Jesus.
SUMMER LOVIN’ PARTY
We ended the semester with a bang! We had 3 students going to Bangladesh in May and 6 students attending MarkCentral (formerly known as City/Script) and we decided to throw a summer themed event with a silent auction and dance party! Most of the food was themed and prepared by the Cooking Group, we made sushi and ice cream cone cupcakes as well as a few snacky items. And we had students, friends and supporters of the ministry at Ryerson donate items and services for the auction. It was a lot of fun, especially as Amber one of new exec leaders served as auctioneer and had fun rallying the crowd to bid on items and facilitating a live auction for a couple items. At the end of the night we raised $800!!!
BANGLADESH
So you may have received my booklet of reflections or seen my other post about Bangladesh but here are a few other snippets that were not in the book.
I was asked in mid-October to be on the staff team for this GUP, a bit of background, I have wanted to go on this GUP since the partnership began, and have been tracking what’s happened/hounding my staff friends upon their return to hear about it each year, so the fact that I was asked was a huge answered prayer. Unfortunately, saying yes would possibly mean that I would say no to standing in my best friend’s wedding. It was a tough decision to make, as this wasn’t just any GUP invite, nor was this just any wedding. I wrestled with the decision, and invited members of my communities to listen and pray with me. In the end, I decided to say yes to Bangladesh, and hope that circumstances would work for me to be part of both good things. It looked like it wasn’t going to work, so I decided to devote as much time as I could helping Naomi with preparations, so that even though I wasn’t physically standing in her wedding, I was very much present. Through a number of what I believe to be God-ordained circumstances, it ended up that the wedding was moved to June, and it would be possible for me to stand in the wedding, and serve by baking the wedding cupcakes! This process and unveiling of circumstances was long and seemingly painfully slow; but in the meantime I recruited 3 of my student leaders to join me in Bangladesh. They jumped into preparations and fundraising and their excitement was contagious! We had the support from the Ryerson community as we went and were excited about what God would show us there. We spent the time before and during the trip reading Donald Miller’s A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, that analyzed the elements of story and through the course of the book Don collects stories and begins living a better story. This became the theme of the trip, as we engaged risk, life in community, conflict, and many other new experiences! For more stories, look at my reflections here.
TEAM RYERSON
Toward the end of the March, I learned that a few changes would be coming my way. First, Veronika who was one of the Toronto interns would be staying in Toronto post-internship and working as a staff volunteer at Ryerson. Then, I found out my supervisor for 3 years, Jamie, would no longer be my supervisor as I would have a new supervisor who would also be pioneering International Student Ministry at Ryerson! A little while later I found out that my friend Dan Clubine, who was staff at York University, would be changing campuses and would be my new full-time staff partner! Then, I found out Joy, Dan’s wife would be going back to school, and would appreciate living downtown. THEN, I found out that maybe the best thing with all of these pieces would be that all of these people would live at the McGill House, just minutes away from campus, with me….and after much deliberation and discernment…it came to be! As of July, this new configuration of people made up the inhabitants of the McGill House, as the intern house became another house in Bloor West Village! Once all the pieces were landed, but before everyone moved in, we announced to the Ryerson IV community, at an end of semester potluck at my house, the changes to the staff team at Ryerson and the McGill House; there was much excitement and rejoicing!
Some Oldies, but oh so goodies!
Hello faithful readers,
My sincere apologies for the long delay in posts. I have many stories to share and hope to have them up with photos soon. In the meantime, here are some stories and highlights from December 2011.
Winter Roadtrip
After a fall semester full of exciting new ministry, I spent some time traveling in the States. I went to visit 2 of my SALI mentees, Pavi in Philadelphia and Sasha in Tampa. And as someone who enjoys the down-time that comes with travel, I decided to embark on this journey with my friend (and sometimes foe) Greyhound.
The journey was long, but I enjoyed the trip down, and enjoyed the books I brought down with me. I was reading the Settlers Cookbook by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, which is a good read but very heavy. One of the things I really appreciated about it was Brown’s migration story, as its one that closely resembles mine, and that mixed with recipes she’s acquired along the way made this read very memorable. Her perspective helped shape and give name to things I inherently knew.
I enjoyed my time in Philly with Pavi. I only spent 24 hours there, but I got to see some of her favorite haunts, check out and hang out at her work, sit in on some meetings, and get a guided tour of Philly. I also had some AMAZING dosa from the Philadelphia Chutney Company.
In Florida, I met up with Sasha and fellow SALI alum Rekha for a quick bite after my very long bus ride. It was really exciting gathering together with my SA sisters and seeing how God had been present and blessing their ministries. Afterward, Sasha and I headed back to her family home. The following day Sasha and I went to Clearwater Beach and met up with some USF students for beach volleyball and a bible study! Afterward, Sasha and I met up with a different group of USF friends to see a street with a beautiful Christmas light display. It was really cool to see but very odd for me to be seeing all these Christmas icons in a place that was so warm that I didn’t need a coat! The next day Sasha and I headed to Orlando, where we fulfilled a dream of mine to visit Celebration USA. Celebration was just as picturesque as I imagined, but still was struck by how friendly the people were and the size and growing diversity. Also that there was a legit university there! To remember my time there, I got a Florida shaped cookie cutter. After Celebration we hung out with one of my SALI staff friends and got a tour of UCF, his campus, and got to hear stories of the some exciting ministries taking place. Following our time at UCF, Sasha and I fulfilled another dream of mine by visiting Sweet, a cupcake shop owned and operated by two-time Cupcake Wars winner, Hollis. The cupcakes were delicious and there were so many to choose from! We took our sweet treats and used enormous amounts of restraint and ate them back at Sasha’s house. The following day, we stayed pretty close to home, and Sasha took me to her favorite rest spot, and while there I finally felt refreshed, and was able to feel really awed at the splendour of God’s creation. I also caught my first fish, and I wanted to cry the whole time. The next day we celebrated Sasha’s mother’s birthday, and we made her a cake. We made a Cashew Carrot Cardamom Cake with almond butter cream cheese icing and topped with chopped cashews. It was so delicious! The following day, my last in Florida, Sasha took me on a tour of USF, her friend Juan who I met while looking at Christmas lights, joined us and offered some of his insightful comments and hilarious experiences during the tour. After our time on campus, Sasha and I made some Florida cookies, some of which, I enjoyed on my bus ride. Then that evening, Sasha drove me to the station, and sent me off.
I began the long, slow journey home. Long story short, the bus I needed to catch to make all my connections was full, and I got put on the next bus, which left 5 hours later; setting back my arrival time 7 hours! Needless to say, I wasn’t impressed with the Greyhound. But it only put a slight damper on my amazing experiences and the wonderful memories from this road trip.
Kingdom Calling
Kingdom Calling happened December 27-31 in Toronto. Kingdom Calling is a conference that replaces the National Student Leaders Conference, which happens to be my favorite Inter-Varsity Conference. Kingdom Calling is a 5-day conference where students in 3rd or 4th year come and receive teaching and vision about what their life could look like post-University and what some ministry options could be. I love this Conference because it was one that had a significant impact on my decision to pursue ministry options with Inter-Varsity, but there’s also this exciting energy as students meet their peers from other campuses and pray and discern for one another as they pursue the next thing God has in store for them. Some of my closest friends in ministry are some of my peers that I met at this conference, so I was eager to be present as staff for this Conference and see the next generation of Kingdom Leaders.
I also had Moses, one of my Ryerson students, attend the conference; and he had a great opportunity to be placed in a small group with fellow art students from OCAD, Emily Carr and Humber. Since the staff from most of those campuses were present, I volunteered to lead a small group of students from another campus that didn’t have staff present. I chose to be intentional and lead the group from Queen’s, as I would be working closely with their Campus Staff this May on a Global Urban Partnership to Bangladesh (more on that here). I had a great time with the Queen’s students as I lead a group with students from three fellowships on that campus; Queen’s Christian Fellowship, Korean Christian Fellowship and International Student Ministry at Queen’s.
Also, I got to spend a bit of time with other students I knew from regional events who either had just returned from Bangladesh or were considering applying for the 2012 team.
The Conference itself offered some great talks and insights. For me, I found it tricky to hear some of the stories and the bold statements of God’s provision, as I was still mourning the cost of saying yes to Bangladesh. Or rather, the talks were propelling me to find out for certain whether I would be celebrating or mourning the costs of saying yes. I found myself with some free time and set aside an hour to find out for certain. Just as I suspected, I found out that I would indeed need more time to mourn the costs. But despite hearing the bad news, it was good to feel supported by some of the staff there who had been journeying alongside me in my discernment. Some of the above mentioned close friends in ministry were there to mourn with me and offer words of encouragement and hope.
The Arch 