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 and then having to stand quietly by as they slowly fade before…
Category: Past generations
The Waiting Heart
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 prepared, the house felt soft and welcoming, and yet I could not settle. I paced the…
A Tender Legacy
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 two emotions that rose above all others were empathy and compassion. They surprised me. Not because I have thought…
He is Risen!
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 over death. He is risen!He is risen indeed! It is such a simple exchange, and yet it carries the weight of everything Easter means….
A Year of Reflection
I have often thought that life seems to move in ten-year chapters. The first ten years are our childhood, when so much is formed in us quietly and deeply, long before we understand what is shaping us. The second ten are our teenage years, when we begin reaching for our own identity and trying to…
Tender Beginnings
Although the day might have seemed like just another day, to me it felt like the world had paused for a moment, holding its breath for something extraordinary. The day felt charged, alive, touched by something beyond the usual routine of life. It was one of those rare moments where I could feel the earth…
The Stories We Keep
There is something about flour on the bench and the smell of cardamom and cinnamon in the air that loosens old stories. When I bake with my granddaughter in my kitchen, I notice that I begin again.The same stories. The same tone. Often the same hand gestures. I tell her about my grandmother’s kitchen —…
Echoed Dreams
She talks about her dreams as if they are already beginning to take shape — a life imagined in bright strokes, full of meaning and promise. There is certainty in her voice, the kind that doesn’t yet know how easily the world can complicate things. I listen, and I am taken back. I remember dreaming…
My Treasure Chest
When I look back, it isn’t the big moments that rise first. It’s the small hands. The weight of a child asleep against my chest. The way time softens when you are watching someone you love grow. Life keeps bringing them to me — first as babies, then as children, then, almost without warning, as…
Forever in My Heart
On your day of independence, my beautiful Finland, my heart always returns to you. It returns with pride, but also with tenderness. Because freedom is never just a word when you know what it cost. It is never only celebration when so much was endured for it. Your independence was paid for in courage, in…
Apples of Gold 