Jenny and I were married twenty-six years ago this month. What makes our anniversary especially meaningful to me is that we met right here — through this community. Emmaus didn’t just help shape my faith. In a very real way, it shaped my family.


This April, our family is stepping into a season full of unknowns. Our daughter Annabelle is graduating college and likely heading toward graduate school. Our son Elliott has been accepted to the United States Coast Guard Academy — we’ll take him to New London, Connecticut at the end of June. Jenny and I will become empty nesters, and we’re navigating that mix of pride and bittersweetness that I suspect many of you know well. On top of all that, both Jenny and I are stepping into new professional chapters of our own.


It’s a lot of “next” all at once.


And honestly? It’s a little scary.


But here’s what I keep coming back to. There’s a verse I pray over myself — and I mean that literally. I write my own name into it: “(Jason), I know the plans I have for you. Plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you a hope and a future.” — Jeremiah 29:11


That’s not a verse about certainty. It’s a verse about trust in the One who holds what we cannot see.


Our community knows something about this. Not long ago, we were living through a season of real uncertainty largely because of covid (I can’t bring myself to capitalize it). Walks were cancelled or postponed. Pilgrim applications were thin. Gatherings felt sparse. Those of us who love this community wondered, quietly, what the future held.


But God was not absent. He was working.


I think about Candlelight — and how the chapel fills with people holding their small flames, and the room just glows. In recent seasons I have been genuinely amazed at how that light keeps growing. More candles. More faces. More evidence of a God who provides.


John 1:16 puts it this way: “Out of his fullness we have all received grace in place of grace already given.”


Grace in place of grace. Not a fixed amount we’re rationing carefully. A fullness that keeps giving — even when we step into seasons we didn’t plan for, couldn’t predict, and aren’t entirely sure how to navigate.


The unknown has never been the enemy of faith. If anything, it’s where faith does its best work.


Someone once said that “experience is something you get just after you need it.” There’s a lot of hard-won truth in that. We rarely feel ready for the changes that come. But looking back, most of us can trace the fingerprints of a faithful God through the very seasons we were most uncertain about.


That’s where trust comes from. Not from having all the answers in advance, but from remembering what God has already done — and choosing to believe He’ll do it again.


Change will keep coming. That’s simply the nature of life. But God doesn’t change. And the grace He’s already given is the grace He’ll give again.


So whatever unknown you’re walking into right now, you don’t have to walk into it alone — and you don’t have to walk into it afraid.



De Colores,

Jason Hill