The Echo of Her Prayers

I read a simple line on Instagram the other day,

“Your grandmother’s prayers are still protecting you.” 

and it landed somewhere deep, deeper than words, it settled into places where old thoughts had been circling for decades, waiting for language.

I come from two grandmothers who lived their faith with certainty.
My mum’s mother, was a practising Catholic.
My dad’s mother, a steadfast fundamental Christian.
Two different paths, two different rituals, yet the same devotion to those they loved.

Of the two, it was my maternal grandmother whose prayers I felt most.

I know she prayed for us, 

not because someone told me, 

but because her warmth wrapped around us in ways I still can’t fully explain.

It was a feeling like hands landing softly on your shoulders,

a knowing that you were held, 

watched, 

protected.

She cared deeply for her whānau. 

Back then, phone calls were too expensive and letters, though frequent, took days or weeks to cross oceans.
But prayers? Prayers were her emails, instant, direct, carried on te hā from Kimihia out into the world. 

Her thoughts, hopes, concerns and love travelled effortlessly across waters and skies, reaching her children in Tāmaki and her siblings in Australia. 

Her prayers were her way of staying connected, of communicating, of nurturing her people from afar.

Over time, I’ve come to understand that thoughts, prayers, and incantations create structure in the unseen. 

They form a kind of scaffold in the veil, something like invisible armour that keeps the warmth we need inside us, and repels the coldness of the world. 

They shape protection, resilience, and belonging in ways that outlive the hands that first built them.

She took her last breath when I was in my early school days, yet I have felt her presence every day since. 

At the time, I couldn’t articulate why. I only knew that something, someone, was still holding me.

It wasn’t until I read that quote that it all clicked into place.

Her prayers didn’t disappear when she did. 

They lingered. 

They wove themselves into my choices, 

my courage, 

my calling. 

They became threads I unknowingly carried into my mahi, into the spaces I craft, into the way I hold people and place.

And then I realised something even deeper:
It’s not just that her prayers are still protecting me.
It’s that I chose to keep them.
To honour them.
To interweave them through everything I do.
To let them become part of the legacy I carry forward.

Because wisdom doesn’t vanish with the generation that birthed it, it becomes a cloak for the next. 

A gentle reminder that we were never walking alone, even when we felt we were carving paths in the dark.

And so this blog closes where it began, with the line that opened the doorway to all these realisations, a truth I now understand in my bones:

“Your grandmother’s prayers are still protecting you.”

May we all remember that what our kuia placed into the world, through thought, through prayer, through breath, continues to shape us, shelter us, and guide us.
And may we carry those blessings forward with intention, weaving them into everything we are becoming.