Reflections from The Cove, two snowflakes, and a swinging bridge
I went to The Cove carrying questions that did not fit neatly into a suitcase.
Nearly two years after Naomi’s death, I am still learning how to live in this season. We shared forty-five years of marriage, faith, and service. Now, at eighty-six, I find myself asking: How do I move forward faithfully without leaving Naomi behind? What should I continue? What should I release? Where is God inviting me to serve?
From October 2–4, 2026, I attended “Walking With God Through the Seasons of Life” with Doug Sauder at the Billy Graham Training Center at The Cove near Asheville, North Carolina. The teaching followed the accounts of Elijah and Elisha in 1 Kings 17 through 2 Kings 2.
There were 243 attendees from eighteen states, including seventy-nine from Calvary Chapel in Florida. Many were older couples or women. Relatively few were single men. Seeing couples together reminded me of the companion I miss.
Yet I was grateful to be there—to listen, walk the trails, worship, and consider what it means to walk with God in the season I am living now.
When the season changes
Spring, summer, fall, and winter offer a familiar picture of life. There are seasons of beginnings, growth, fruitfulness, loss, and waiting. Sometimes several seem to overlap.
Naomi and I experienced many of them together. We built a family, worked, served, faced illness, and learned to depend on God through circumstances we would never have chosen.
Her death changed the shape of my daily life. The person with whom I shared ordinary conversations, decisions, prayers, and memories was no longer beside me.
One passage connected with the retreat was Psalm 31:15: “My times are in your hands.”
That truth invites trust even when I cannot explain the timing of my circumstances. I can bring God my questions while entrusting Him with the days still before me.
Perhaps you are living through a change of season too. Retirement, illness, the loss of someone you love, or a change in responsibility may leave you wondering what comes next.
Can we trust God with a season before we understand what it will become?
When the brook dries up
Elijah’s experience at the brook Cherith stayed with me. God had provided for him there, but eventually the brook dried up.
A place of provision became a place he could no longer remain.
I thought about how easily I can associate God’s faithfulness with familiar circumstances. When those circumstances change, I want an explanation—and preferably a clear plan.
But walking with God requires dependence along the way. A truth I carried home from The Cove was this:
Life with God is relationship, not transaction.
I cannot turn faithfulness into a bargain in which service guarantees comfort or obedience guarantees an easy path. I am invited to know God, trust Him, and respond to Him through changing circumstances.
The dried brook also leaves me with a question: Am I trying to preserve a former season when God may be preparing me to take another step?
Waiting is not a waste
Another thought from the retreat was simple enough to remember and challenging enough to practice:
Waiting is not a waste.
I like having something useful to do. An idea can quickly become a project, and a project can fill my calendar. Yet activity alone does not tell me whether I am following God’s direction.
A season of waiting may give me room to grieve, listen, pray, and recognize what I can realistically undertake. It may also help me receive the people and opportunities already nearby.
I do not need to settle every question about the rest of my life today. I can ask what faithfulness looks like in the day God has given me.
That includes stewardship. How I use my gifts, time, energy, and resources matters. So does whom I remember in prayer.
What has God placed in my hands, and who has He placed on my heart?
Two snowflakes, one shared life
While at The Cove, I pictured two snowflakes.
God was preparing two very different servants in different places. Naomi had her family heritage, education, nursing experiences, and growing desire to serve. I had my own history, work, questions, and developing faith.
We did not know each other during much of that preparation. Looking back, I recognize ways those experiences shaped the people we became.
Then our paths met in Milwaukee when Naomi reluctantly returned. But that’s another story for later. We married in 1979 and shared forty-five years together.
I cannot explain every event as though I possess God’s complete plan. But I can look back with gratitude at the grace that brought us together and sustained us. A clear example to me of God’s providence. He knew what He was doing!
Two different lives became one shared life of faith and service. To God be the glory.
Remembering that gives me a way to honor Naomi while continuing to walk with the God we both trusted.
A bridge between seasons
After The Cove, I returned to Buckhorn, Kentucky, where Naomi served as a nurse from 1974 to 1977.
With help from a local postal worker and Google Maps, I found the long wooden swinging bridge she had crossed to visit a patient. On the back of the original photograph, Naomi had written the year 1976 and the name Verna Farler.
The photograph shows Naomi with a wheelbarrow and supplies. Someone on the other side needed care.
Standing there fifty years later, I wondered how that crossing had felt to her. She was about twenty-six, a young nurse serving people in the mountains. I was eighty-six, looking at the same crossing with a very different measure of strength and confidence. I guess to Naomi it was just another day or work?
I walked about twenty feet onto the bridge and stopped. I was alone and concerned about dropping my phone through the wooden slats.
That moment brought a new closeness to a part of Naomi’s life I had not witnessed. Her calling had taken practical form: a patient, supplies, a difficult crossing, and a visit.
The bridge helped me see the connection between calling and an ordinary act of faithfulness. We may speak broadly about mission and purpose, but someone still needs to make the visit.
What continues
During this return to Kentucky, I sponsored a community meal at the Little Flower Clinic in Hazard, visited Buckhorn School, and observed the Bible Release Time ministry for third- and fourth-grade students at Rufus Camp.
I also discussed support for a future nursing or healthcare student in Naomi’s memory.
These encounters gave me concrete ways to connect remembrance with service. I do not yet know what every possibility will become. I can prayerfully consider each one without needing to turn it into a large undertaking.
At The Cove, we closed with The Blessing / Doxology. Its emphasis on families and generations connected deeply with my hope for Naomi’s story.
I want our children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and those who follow them to know something of her life—and, through that life, to see the Jesus she loved and served.
The seeds she planted may continue bearing fruit in ways I will never see.
The next faithful step
Romans 15:13 speaks of the God of hope filling us with joy and peace as we trust Him, so that hope overflows through the power of the Holy Spirit.
That is my prayer for this season.
I came home from The Cove with truths to carry into daily life: my times are in God’s hands; waiting can have purpose; my gifts remain a stewardship; and there are people I can still love and serve.
For you, the next faithful step may be a conversation, a visit, a decision, or time set aside to listen and pray.
What season are you living in? What are you being invited to release, and what small act of faithfulness is before you today?
Lord, thank You for walking with us through every season. Help us trust You when familiar streams dry up and the way ahead is unclear. Give us patience to wait, wisdom to recognize the next faithful step, and compassion to serve the person You place before us. May the stories of our lives point our families and the generations to come toward Jesus. In Jesus’s name, amen.
