Elizabeth Winston* steadied her voice and then began to sing with focused praise the familiar hymn that had become a part of her story, “?’Tis So Sweet to Trust in Jesus.”
New followers of Jesus use henna on the hands of a South Carolina volunteer to help tell the stories of the Old Testament prophets and then Jesus.That same kind of trust was exactly what had brought Winston from Westminster to sing that day before that particular audience – a Bengali Muslim family in a small town in Bangladesh.
The performance was both impromptu and on demand.
“It was really wonderful to sing to them,” Winston said. “They seemed to enjoy it.”
The trip this past summer was Winston’s second to Bangladesh, but it was her first time to meet the family who had treated her and other South Carolina volunteers to dinner in their home. Her first trip to Bangladesh was in 2005 when she joined others in prayerwalking and home visits.
That first trip was brought about by a dream she had had years earlier.
“Back in 1969, I was 18 years old, and I just had a dream one night, and in the dream the Lord spoke ‘Bangladesh’ to me,” Winston said. “I told my mama about it, and I asked her what it was. She didn’t know whether it was a thing, an animal or a place. She just didn’t know. I didn’t find out until years later that Bangladesh was a country. Still, l had no idea that I would actually be coming to that place.”
Then in 2005, Winston saw that the South Carolina Baptist Convention would be equipping a volunteer team to serve in Bangladesh. Winston is a member of Calvary Redemption Baptist Church in Walhalla, a church affiliated with the Baptist Educational and Missionary Convention of South Carolina with which the South Carolina Baptist Convention has partnered in the past.
“Is there really a team going there?” Winston asked.
During that first trip, Winston found Bangladesh to be very different from the southern United States, but her heart was knit with the Bangladeshi people.
“The witnessing was a little different, because we didn’t have quite the freedom to do open witnessing,” she said.
As they walked and prayed and searched for “people of peace” (see Luke 10), several Bangladeshis invited the volunteers into their homes.
“In one restaurant, a family invited us into their home for supper,” Winston said. “I thought that was beautiful the way they opened up.”
That first experience helped Winston see the spiritual hunger of Bangladesh’s 156 million people and gave her a taste of what the Lord could do through volunteers.
“The love for these people, really that is what brought me back this time,” she said. “Lydia Kayden* called me in December and said they had a trip lined up. I told her it didn’t matter what we had to do, that I really wanted to come back.”
During her second trip, Winston, Kayden, her adult daughter, and another South Carolina volunteer trained Bengali-speaking women – mostly former Muslims now following Jesus – how to teach Bible stories orally and in chronological order.
“I’ve seen the Lord at work from day one,” Winston said. “It excited me to see the Bangladeshi women there who were so open. They were able to laugh and talk and to be able to get up and express themselves. And they are so quick to learn.”
Winston has also made international mission trips to Nepal, Honduras, Africa, and the Bahamas, but it was the word “Bangladesh” that the Lord gave her 40 years ago in a dream.
Will Winston make a third and fourth trip to Bangladesh?
“Yes,” she said, “I would like to.”
*Names changed for security reasons. Frances serves among South Asian peoples as an International Mission Board writer.