Recently, I moved from Wapakoneta to the Cincinnati area to live more fully into my calling as a pastor. It was one of those moves filled with boxes, goodbyes, excitement, grief, too many trips back and forth, and that strange feeling of knowing your life is changing while you are still standing in the middle of it.
Somewhere in all of that, I found myself thinking about the things we carry with us: stories, habits, prayers, ways of loving people, little things we do because someone before us did them first. Long before I became a pastor, I learned something about all of that in a bakery.
A Little Bakery in Wapakoneta
In 1995, my mother, Beth, started Beth’s Bakery in Wapakoneta. She made cookies, birthday cakes, graduation cakes, wedding cakes, and all those sweet things that somehow end up sitting right in the middle of some of the biggest moments of our lives.
There is something kind of wonderful about that when you think about it. A cake is rarely just a cake. It sits in the background of photographs. It gets cut while people are laughing. It gets surrounded by candles and wishes and people singing slightly off-key. It marks the moment when someone says, “We made it.”
And in our bakery, sometimes it got prayed over.
From the very beginning, my mother had a practice. Before a wedding cake left the bakery, we prayed over it. Every one. Before it was loaded into the car and driven off to a church, ballroom, barn, reception hall, or wherever two people were about to begin a life together, there was a prayer.
A prayer for the couple, for their marriage, and for whatever joys, heartaches, surprises, and ordinary Tuesdays were waiting for them somewhere down the road.
Most couples never knew. It was not on the invoice. There was no little line that said: Wedding cake. Delivery. Buttercream flowers. Prayer included.
It was just something we did. Part of the work. Part of the love.
Then the Hands Changed
Fast-forward to 2020, when I took over the bakery. There were recipes to carry forward, traditions to keep, things I wanted to change, things I probably should not have changed, and 25 years of history already baked into the walls.
But there was one thing I knew would continue.
Before a wedding cake left the bakery, I prayed over it.
The hands changed. The prayer did not.
For a while, that simply felt like one of the traditions I had inherited from my mother. Then something began to happen that made me see it differently.
Every once in a while, we would realize that a couple sitting across from us talking about their wedding cake had a connection to one we had made years before. And sometimes that connection was this: my mother had made their parents’ wedding cake.
That still amazes me.
Years earlier, my mom had stood in that bakery putting the finishing touches on a cake for two young people about to begin their life together. Then she prayed over it, and off it went.
Then life did what life does. Years passed. A marriage unfolded. A family grew. Children were born. Those children got older. And one day, one of them walked back through the same bakery door.
Now they were the one getting married. There was another cake on the table, another beginning, another family gathering, another prayer.
Only this time, I was the one praying.
I love that because no one planned it. My mother was not standing there all those years ago thinking, “Maybe someday their daughter will come back here and Anthony will make her wedding cake.” She was simply faithfully doing what she knew to do in that moment: make the cake, pray the prayer, send it out into the world.
And somehow, decades later, the story came back around.
Watching Families Grow Up in Frosting
It wasn’t just weddings, either. We saw it with birthdays, graduations, anniversaries, baby showers, and all those little markers we use to say: something happened here. Someone grew. Someone changed. Someone made it. Someone is beginning again.
There were children whose birthday cakes my mom had made who eventually became parents ordering birthday cakes for children of their own. Families came back again and again until we knew their names, their traditions, their favorite flavors, and sometimes what they were going to order before they even ordered it.
A graduation cake became a wedding cake. A wedding cake became a baby shower cake. A baby shower cake became a first birthday cake.
And suddenly you realized you had been watching a family grow up in frosting.
There is something wonderfully ordinary about that. And wonderfully holy.
The Things We Carry
I think connection across generations often happens this way. Sometimes it is immediate and fleeting: a conversation after church, a story shared over coffee, a teenager teaching someone how to use an app, an older adult saying one sentence that sticks with you for the next twenty years.
Sometimes it happens so naturally that we barely notice. A recipe gets passed down. A family saying gets repeated. A prayer becomes familiar. Someone starts doing something simply because they watched someone else do it for years.
And sometimes it takes a very long time to reveal itself. Years. Decades, even. Sometimes you do not know you are part of the story until the story circles back around and taps you on the shoulder.
That is what those wedding cakes began to teach me.
These connections matter because none of us becomes who we are alone. We are shaped by what others hand to us, and by what we choose to hand forward.
Today, I am no longer standing behind the counter at Beth’s Bakery. I am serving a congregation in the Cincinnati area.
Different building. Different work. Less buttercream. Usually.
But in some ways, the work feels strangely familiar. I am still invited into people’s sacred moments: weddings, funerals, baptisms, birthdays, illness, beginnings, endings, and ordinary Sundays that do not feel especially important until years later when you realize they were.
I am still listening to stories. Still receiving things handed down. Still wondering what needs to be carried forward. Still wondering what we are planting now that someone else may one day inherit.
We do not always know what will last. We do not know which story someone will remember, which habit they will keep, which kindness they will repeat, or which prayer they will whisper years later because they once heard someone else whisper it first.
Sometimes we simply do the faithful thing in front of us and trust the story to keep moving.
My mother began praying over wedding cakes in 1995. She could not have known where all those prayers would travel. She could not have known that some of them would come wandering back through the bakery door a generation later.
But they did.
And there I was. Another cake. Another beginning. Another prayer.
The hands had changed, but the prayer was still being passed along.
Maybe that is one small glimpse of Abundant Aging. Not simply growing older, but growing deeper into the awareness that our lives are connected to lives before us and lives after us; receiving, remembering, passing along, and letting our stories spill gently into one another.
And every once in a while, we are given the gift of seeing something we thought belonged to the past show up again—still alive, still moving, still blessing the next generation.
A Few Questions to Carry With You
- What practice or tradition in your life came to you from someone before you?
- Who taught you something important without ever really sitting down to teach you?
- What story, recipe, prayer, saying, or ritual do you hope someone else carries forward?
- When has someone much older or younger than you changed the way you see something?
- What are you doing today that may still be shaping someone long after you are gone?
- What might already be living in you that was handed down so quietly you almost missed it?
One more question: what are you doing with what has been handed to you?
What are you carrying forward, and who might one day carry it after you?
Maybe that is the invitation—to notice the stories, wisdom, love, and practices already moving between us, and to keep passing along what gives life.
That, too, is a call to Abundant Aging.
