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The inaugural Walk of Love Gathering held at The Hubs Vine on Saturday, March 1, was a resounding success in its mission to honor, encourage and celebrate widows and widowers in the area.

The sold-out event was organized by Franklin-based nonprofit The Widow Walk, which has the following mission, purpose and vision:

• The mission of equipping widows/widowers on a path together toward a new start with a new finish;
• The purpose to create a national community of widows/widowers empowering one another; and 
• The vision to develop eternally minded resources focused on grief education, expression and empowerment.

The Widow Walk was founded by speaker, author, artist, songwriter and musician Micah Nowell Dillon, who became a widow in 2017 at the age of 36.

“Thank you for signing up for the Walk of Love Gathering,” she said to attendees near the beginning of the event. “This is our first annual — we will be doing this again. And why did we do this? Because Valentine’s (Day) can be kind of a downer for the widows and the widowers, and I said, ‘No, we need to cheer you up!’ I wanted to be cheered up, so what are we going to do? We’re going to eat good tonight.”

She thanked Hubs for the accommodations.

To the attendees, Dillon said, “We have spared no expense, because you are worth it, and we want you to feel loved from start to finish.”

What followed was a time of eating, fellowship, music and also testimony from others who have been on the widow walk.

USA Today-bestselling author Nancy Naigle, who lives in Franklin, was the special speaker for the evening.

“My walk started in 2014,” she said. “I’d been married for 20 years. My husband lost a very short battle to stage-four lung cancer.”

His name was Mike Holland.

Long before Holland’s passing, Naigle had strongly established that one of her coping mechanisms in life was reading.

“I was reading voraciously,” she said. “I was buying books as fast as they were putting them out, just filling the well, … and one morning, I woke up and I thought, ‘You know, if I could write one book to help one girl through one bad day, that would be an amazing gift.’ And so that’s what I set out to do in 2002.”

She said it took nine years to get her first book sold. She had eight or nine books out by 2013, which is when her husband was diagnosed with cancer.

“But I had never expected (writing) to be a career,” she said. “It was something that I did on the side to make myself feel good and to help other people. But when he passed away, I realized pretty quickly that those stories that had come to me at this time when I turned 40 to make one girl feel better were really just God positioning me for something different at a different time in my life.”

On Naigle’s website, it notes that her 2021 release of “The Shell Collector” debuted in the top 20 on the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association (ECPA) Bestseller list and was optioned in a book-to-movie deal as the first Fox Original movie. “The Shell Collector” can be seen on FOXNation.

Naigle’s website goes on to state that several of her books have inspired made-for-television movies that can be seen on the Hallmark Channel and Hallmark Movies & Mysteries. She also wrote the novelization for the first three Hallmark Original Movies in the popular Christmas in Evergreen series.

After Naigle finished sharing her personal story, she answered questions from attendees.

Dillon also made available some of her own books that she had written, describing them as grief expressions and offering them as sources of encouragement to those in attendance.