We cannot decide how many years our story will contain, but we can choose what we write into the years we are given. This weekend, as we celebrate fathers here in Australia, I find myself looking into the eyes of a man I never had the privilege of meeting. My paternal grandfather looks back at…
Category: Past generations
Hidden Nests
Perhaps the quieter seasons of life reveal things that its busiest seasons never allowed us to see. When I walk my neighbourhood in midwinter, I notice how the season has stripped so many of the trees bare. The leaves are gone now, revealing what had been hidden all along: abandoned bird nests sitting quietly among…
The Long Goodbye
Sometimes the hardest part of caring for someone is accepting that we cannot make them better, while recognising that we can still make a difference in their days. There is a grief that comes with watching a parent fade that is almost impossible to explain unless you have lived it. It is the grief of…
Books and Roses
Perhaps the most meaningful way to challenge expectations is not through rebellion, but through the quiet confidence of being ourselves. My two grandfathers were not exactly what you would call traditional men, even though both were born in the early 1900s. My father’s father loved cooking, baking, and cleaning. Domestic work came naturally to him….
Dad’s Fading Light
Perhaps some of life’s deepest sorrows are inseparable from its greatest blessings. My 90-year-old dad is slowly slipping away. Day by day, the flame in his candle grows dimmer, and I find myself watching that light with a grief too deep for words. There is something so heartbreaking about loving someone for your whole life…
The Waiting Heart
There are stories we carry for years before life gives us the experience to understand them. On Sunday night, I found myself waiting for my seventeen-year-old grandson to arrive. He was making his own way from home to our place, travelling more than one hundred kilometres from door to door. I had a warm meal…
A Tender Legacy
We may never see the full answer to our prayers, but their blessings may reach far beyond our lifetime. As part of a six-week course I am doing, I was asked to take a test to discover which emotions most strongly drive me. When the results came back, they stopped me in my tracks. The…
He is Risen!
Sometimes we arrive at a moment believing we know how the story ends, only to discover that God has written something we never imagined. There is an ancient and joyous Paschal greeting that has echoed across generations of Christians, celebrating the resurrection of Jesus Christ and proclaiming hope, new life, and the victory of life…
A Year of Reflection
Sometimes it takes standing between generations to truly recognise where we are in our own journey. I have often found myself thinking of life in chapters of ten years. There is something about a decade that seems to give the passing of time a shape. Ten years can sound like such a long stretch when…
The Stories We Keep
The stories we hear again and again often become the ones we carry long after the storyteller has fallen silent. There is something about the smell of cardamom and cinnamon in the kitchen, and the feel of flour on the bench, that seems to loosen old stories and bring them back to the surface. When…
