The gifts
A lifetime of building, solving, connecting, and seeing possibility.
An upcoming book by Trevor Chevalier
Starfish
Float
Sometimes the way forward begins by learning to be still.
Enter the story
The interruption
He was not simply building a business. He was building the future he expected to spend the rest of his life expanding.
Then, in a single moment, that future changed.
July 12, 2015
The life he built disappeared.The builder did not!
A motorcycle accident divided Trevor’s life into before and after.
A traumatic brain injury brought relentless pain, invisible limitations, and the loss of the company, independence, identity, and future he believed would still be waiting when he recovered.
Yet creativity remained.Determination remained.Compassion remained.Faith remained.
Learning to float
Surrender was not giving up.
For a man accustomed to solving, pushing, and carrying responsibility, becoming still felt almost impossible.
Sometimes letting yourself be held is how you survive long enough to discover what comes next.
Nothing was wasted
The hardest chapters were becoming preparation.
Early encounters with addiction, treatment, and family counseling. Disability. Caring for his father. Serving neighbors in need. Faith. The stillness of the Mojave Desert. What once looked like disconnected experiences slowly began forming one larger picture.
The refining
Pain deepened compassion. Dependence taught dignity. Service made suffering personal.
The calling
Use what remained to help restore hope, purpose, community, and lives!
The book
The fuller story is still being written.
Starfish Float is a story of building and breaking, striving and surrender, faith and the unexpected purpose that can rise from a life interrupted.
This website offers only the shoreline. The book will tell what happened beneath the surface.
“Breathe. Let go. Let yourself be held.”
A Living Story
Starfish FloatA Living Story
The story continues.
The mission grows!
Starfish Float was never meant to end with one book. It is an unfolding story of healing, calling, community, unexpected connections, and a mission still taking shape.
Each future volume can follow the next chapter, introduce the people and possibilities encountered along the way, and reveal what happens as emerging ideas begin moving toward action.
The books will preserve the story as it happens, allowing readers to look back at where the journey began while continuing forward into everything still to come.
THE STORY BEGINS
Starfish Float
The current book preserves the beginning of Trevor’s journey from building and breaking toward healing, faith, calling, and the mission now taking shape.
Breathe. Let go.Trevor W. Chevalier · First volume
Let yourself be held.
THE STORY CONTINUES
Future Volumes
Future books may follow new chapters, people, partnerships, initiatives, and real-world moments as the story continues to unfold.
Trevor begins this living story and hopes to write future volumes alongside the people who become part of it. But Starfish Float is being built to outlive any one author or leader. His role is to light the torch, establish the foundation, and one day entrust it to those called and equipped to carry the story and mission forward.
No invented titles. No predetermined authors. The next chapter will be revealed by the journey.01The first book02The unfolding story03Emerging Initiatives04Starfish Forward05What comes next
The book begins the story.What happens next becomes part of it!
Starfish Forward
Every story can carry something forward.
Read the story.
Help write what comes next!
Starfish Forward is the bridge between an unfolding story and the possibilities it may help bring to life.
As new books, people, partnerships, and initiatives become part of the journey, readers will be invited to follow the progress, share what moves them, and help carry promising possibilities forward.
One story can inspire another. One reader can become a participant. One act of support can help the next chapter begin.
The first chapter revealed what Trevor could build. The next revealed what he was being prepared to build.
Life Interrupted
The future he expected disappeared.
Learning to Heal
Recovery became a different way of living.
Calling Revealed
Hardship began gathering into purpose.
Wellsprings Taking Shape
The gifts to build found a new direction.
July 12, 2015
What disappeared.
What remained.
A motorcycle accident left Trevor with a traumatic brain injury. He did not immediately walk away from the company he had helped conceive, build, and equally own. He tried to remain involved while reshaping his responsibilities around the strengths and capacity that remained. But the business had been built around extraordinary hours, constant availability, and sustained production—the same pace Trevor had once been known for maintaining. As the effects of his injury became clearer, a sustainable path forward could not ultimately be established.
What began as time away to focus on recovery was intended to help Trevor heal and return. He went to Minnesota to be near family, establish a stronger support system, and devote himself to medical care. After waiting more than double the time doctors said an injury-related nerve palsy would take to resolve, he underwent multiple eye surgeries. The procedures improved some aspects of his eye alignment and reduced the prism correction required in his glasses, but they did not fully resolve the problem. Maintaining alignment can still demand intense concentration, and the surgeries did not relieve the chronic headaches or broader neurological symptoms that had transformed his daily life.
Recovery gradually became less about finding one procedure that could restore the life he had known and more about learning how to live faithfully within a changed body. Trevor worked to reduce his reliance on difficult medications and immersed himself in breathwork, meditation, pacing, body awareness, and new approaches to pain. Instead of continually fighting his symptoms, he began learning his baseline, respecting his limits, and meeting pain with greater patience, acceptance, and compassion.
Recovery became less about returning to the person he had been and more about learning to live faithfully within the person he had become.
The injury changed the conditions under which Trevor could work, but it did not diminish his creativity, judgment, ambition, or capacity to build meaningful things. The years that followed nevertheless stripped away nearly everything by which he had measured progress, independence, success, and possibility.
But they did not take away the gifts God had placed within him.
The instinct to create. The ability to see possibility. The determination to find a way forward. The desire to encourage people, bring joy, serve others, and notice the quiet gifts and small miracles that are so easily overlooked.
Over time, he began to understand that his ability to build had never been meant only for business.
Led into the desert
A search for healing that began revealing something larger.
Seeking a place where his body and mind might find greater stability, Trevor was drawn to the Mojave Desert. Its warmth, stillness, open space, and more consistent climate offered more than a change of scenery. The desert became part of his own search for healing, eventually leading him to Dolan Springs, Arizona.
What began as a personal refuge gradually revealed a much larger calling.
Time spent close to the land brought Trevor into deeper relationship with the community. Dolan Springs possesses a distinctive presence, found somewhere within its elevation, vast landscape, desert stillness, and something more difficult to explain. Here, Trevor encountered not only people searching for healing, support, connection, and a way forward, but a place capable of contributing to restoration.
Addiction, treatment, and the whole family
Trevor’s understanding of addiction and recovery began long before the vision for a healing center. As a child, he watched someone he loved move repeatedly through inpatient treatment, outpatient programs, recovery meetings, and the difficult work of beginning again. Because the family participated in counseling and treatment sessions, he learned early that addiction never belongs to only one person. It reaches parents, siblings, relationships, finances, trust, and the emotional life of an entire family.
That understanding did not remain in childhood. As he grew older, addiction and substance abuse continued to affect friends and people he loved. He saw relationships fracture, promising lives become entangled in the criminal justice system, families carry fear and uncertainty, and some lives end far too soon. He also saw that alcohol and drugs are only part of the picture. Trauma, grief, mental illness, chronic pain, isolation, and hopelessness can leave people fighting for their lives in ways that are not always visible to anyone around them.
Coming to know Dolan Springs brought these experiences into sharper focus. The addiction challenges affecting individuals, families, and the wider community were not abstract needs. They belonged to a much longer pattern Trevor had been witnessing for most of his life.
Caregiving and family
Years later, as his father’s progressive neurological illness changed daily life, Trevor and his family encountered realities faced by countless families: navigating complex care, working within limited resources, and confronting the distance between what people need and what existing systems can provide.
Serious illness does not affect only the person diagnosed. It reshapes roles, relationships, routines, and expectations throughout an entire family. Love and devotion can exist alongside exhaustion, grief, tension, uncertainty, and a profound need for emotional support, especially when everyone is carrying more than they were prepared to carry.
Through his own disability, experiences of loss, and his family’s caregiving journey, Trevor saw how illness and hardship reach into every part of a life: physical, emotional, relational, financial, and spiritual. He also saw how easily people can be left without clear pathways forward.
From darkness to calling
Trevor knew something about that darkness personally. Years of unrelenting pain, disability, loss, dependence, and uncertainty brought him to places he never imagined his life would reach. The life he had built was gone, the future he expected had collapsed, and at times the weight of simply continuing felt almost impossible to carry.
Faith did not make the pain disappear, but it changed what the pain could become. Through prayer, surrender, the people he had encountered, the needs he had witnessed, and ideas gathered across a lifetime, Trevor came to understand the vision taking shape as God’s direction and grace in his own life. What had seemed like disconnected experiences began coming together as one calling: to use the years that remain to proclaim the hope of Jesus Christ and build something enduring that can help many people find healing, dignity, community, and renewed purpose for generations to come.
Service and dignity
His service as a Vincentian with the Society of St. Vincent de Paul further grounded that understanding in personal encounter, dignity, and practical care for neighbors in need.
These experiences did not give him entirely new gifts. They revealed where the gifts he had always carried might now be needed most.
A larger story emerging
Nothing was wasted.
A lifetime of witnessing addiction and its effects on families, the accident, years of disability, the search for healing, devastating losses, family caregiving, a faith forged in darkness, and the needs encountered in the desert were becoming one larger picture.
The gifts
Entrepreneurship, leadership, technology, creativity, and a lifelong instinct to turn possibility into something real.
The refining
Pain, loss, dependence, treatment and family recovery experiences, caregiving, faith, and firsthand encounters with the gaps people face when needs exceed the systems meant to serve them.
The calling
To bring everything learned through building and breaking into Christ-centered work that restores hope, creates opportunity, and changes lives.
From one life to many lives
Where a lifetime of building
meets a calling to serve.
Starfish Float is more than the account of what happened. It is the story beneath a growing Christ-centered vision to restore what is broken and create pathways from crisis to healing, from isolation to community, and from brokenness to renewed purpose and hope.
The broader nonprofit foundation
Wellsprings Mission
One Christ-centered vision connecting locally rooted service with national care platforms, responsible technology, and pathways toward healing, dignity, purpose, and hope.
Explore Wellsprings Mission ↗ A long-term flagship ministryHealing and Restoration
A developing Christ-centered place of refuge, recovery, healing, and whole-person restoration in Dolan Springs, Arizona.
Discover the vision ↗The vision is in formation. It will be shaped through prayer, responsible inquiry, professional expertise, and the people called to help carry it forward.
About the book
A story of striving, surrender, and what can rise from a life interrupted.
What happens when the very qualities that built a life can no longer carry it?
A starfish float asks us to stop fighting the water, open our arms, become still, and trust that we can be held.
Starfish Float is the true story of a man formed to build, driven to deliver, and certain he knew the future he was creating. It is also the story of what happened when that future disappeared, and when years of pain, loss, faith, and reluctant surrender began revealing a purpose larger than the life he had planned.
The heart of the story
“Sometimes surviving does not mean fighting harder. Sometimes it means becoming still enough to let yourself be held.”
The work has changed
But the calling
to build has not.
Across every chapter, the commitment remains: recognize the unmet need, connect people and possibility, and find a practical way forward.
Perhaps our paths have crossed
Do we know each other from another chapter?
Perhaps we worked together, served together, built something together, or simply crossed paths somewhere along the way. Or perhaps you are a builder, leader, minister, entrepreneur, philanthropist, caregiver, advocate, person of faith, or someone who may bring insight, relationships, resources, or an open door to what comes next.
Whether you remember me from the past or feel drawn to the future taking shape, I would be glad to connect!
LinkedIn is only one way to reconnect. If you would rather reach out personally, send me a note here. Whether we shared years, a season, or only a moment, I would be glad to hear from you!
A note from the shore
Every meaningful connection
begins somewhere.
To share a reflection, ask about Starfish Float, or begin a meaningful conversation about the book and the journey behind it, you are warmly invited to reach out. To explore the nonprofit work growing from the story, visit StarfishFloat.org.
Sometimes, it begins with a simple note.
Also known around the family as “the Spice Girls”
The four who helped carry me
Love has four names.
After the motorcycle accident, life became smaller in ways Trevor never expected. In the life that followed, God gave him Phoebe, Penny, Polly, and Pippi—his four fur girls, his family, and his constant companions.
They remain beside him through the difficult days, offering affection without condition, comfort without words, and a kind of healing that only animals seem to understand. They have helped carry him through pain, loss, isolation, and uncertainty. Trevor believes God sent him four because he needed that much love—and he truly believes they helped save his life!
Their presence is part of the story too!
Follow the living story
Follow the Story.
See What Comes Next!
Follow the living story as new chapters are written, future books take shape, partnerships form, and Emerging Initiatives begin moving toward action.
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