“Because love and wisdom exist and subsist in use, it is use that affects us; and use is to perform faithfully, sincerely, and diligently the work of one’s function.” Conjugial Love 16

As a Senior in the Kempton New Church School, we have the opportunity to choose a Senior Project where we get a chance to personalize our education and pursue something we are interested in. For my Senior Project I chose to organize a Kempton New Church School Senior Service Trip to Tema, Ghana, with much help from Rev. George Dziekpor and his daughter Klenam Dziekpor. 

Our service group consisted of myself and the two other KNCS seniors, Percy Brown and Hayden King, and also Joram Heinrichs, a senior from the Carmel New Church Society in Kitchener, Ontario. My dad, Rev. Brett Buick and Miss Vivienne Riley, both faculty from KNCS, also accompanied us as support and chaperones.

This trip was life changing for me, and I feel so incredibly blessed to have been able to travel to Ghana and meet so many wonderful people.

Like most mothers, I spend a lot of time thinking about my children and how to best equip them for life in this world and the next. And some of the biggest questions I spend time on are: how do you raise children to love the Lord? To trust Him? To maintain faith in the face of an increasingly secular world? To seek the Lord’s help in times of trouble?

In my reading for a doctrinal class I came across this passage:

“God flows into what everyone knows about God, bringing about an acknowledgement of God, and at the same time imparting His love for mankind… if a person receives both the first and the second, the inflow reaches his will and comes from there into his understanding, so occupying his whole mind. Then he makes an inward acknowledgement of God, which bring to life what he knows about God, so that his condition resembles a garden in springtime.” True Christian Religion 457:2

And there is it! A perfect, compact answer to how to attain faith in the Lord. That “inward acknowledgement” that brings the Lord to life in our understanding; that is what I want for my children more than anything. And of course, the Lord has a perfect system for how this happens. And it starts with “what everyone knows about God.”

My parents never seemed to go anywhere, seemingly content with the quiet life they lead at home. Or so I thought. As it turns out my mother would love to have travelled to Canada to see her cousin or to Australia to visit family there. She dreamed of being able to travel to many beautiful places in the world just to be able to breathe it all in.  But year by year goes by and still they don’t travel beyond the borders of their home country.  

The reason was quite simple: fear. They seem scared of lots of things –spending too much money, the cat left behind at home, going somewhere they don’t speak the language and not being able to communicate, getting sick abroad, etc. Now, sadly, they wont travel anywhere. My father can no longer walk and is confined to a wheelchair due to Brain Cancer and my mother is at home caring for him, unable to go out for too long just in case he needs something. My mother is content, but I know she feels some hidden regrets that they didn’t do more.

Far too many of our own dreams die because of fear. Too many of us let fear stop us from pursuing something the Lord may be leading us to do. I have started to look at my life and at those around me to understand what it is that I’m afraid of…

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, isn’t it? It enables us to see and understand so much more about our lives than we might otherwise! It is through hindsight – perhaps much further down the road, but eventually – that we can appreciate that the ‘curses’ in our lives really did have resulting good come out of them. The Lord teaches us that He’s got our backs: His Providence, although invisible to our eyes, surrounds everything we do in order to protect us from ourselves, to help us through our lives and onward to heaven. 

We are allowed to see Divine Providence from behind but not face to face, and when we are in a spiritual state, not in a materialistic state. Seeing Divine Providence from behind but not face to face is seeing it after the fact but not before; and seeing it when we are in a spiritual state and not in a materialistic state is seeing it from heaven and not from this world. Everyone who accepts inflow from heaven and recognizes Divine Providence (and especially people who have become spiritual by virtue of their reformation), on seeing events in their amazing kind of sequence, virtually sees Providence from a deep recognition and confesses it. Such people do not want to see it face to face, that is, before things happen, because they are afraid their own volition would interfere with some element of its orderly sequence. (Divine Providence 187.4)