The Malaika series came from one of the most personal dimensions of my spiritual life — my relationship with my guardian angel. Christian theology teaches that each of us is accompanied through life by a guardian angel, a spiritual companion assigned to us from our very beginning. When I began to take that teaching seriously — not only as doctrine but as a living relationship — something opened in my interior life that supported me through some of the most demanding years of my corporate career in ways I could not have anticipated.

That relationship with my guardian angel was a source of profound comfort, guidance, and presence during years when the external world was relentless. I wanted to give children what I discovered as an adult — access to that companionship from the very beginning, before life asks the harder things of them. Malaika is my way of saying to the youngest readers: you are not alone. You have a friend in the unseen world who is entirely yours, who knows you completely, and who is always near.