A painting hangs in Tara Bové’s home, created by a woman who had never met her.
She received it recently, at the end of a mission trip in Peru with her son, Luke. The artist had been praying for the group from afar and felt led to create a painting for each member, using a technique called “intuitive abstract art.” As they worked on Tara’s painting, colors took shape without a predetermined destination until, slowly, a garden appeared. Flowers stand in deep blues, golds, and oranges. Butterflies hover among them. At the top are the words, “Florecerás y darás muchos frutos,” meaning “you will flourish and bear much fruit,” a reference to Isaiah 35. The artist described it as “the beauty that had been hidden all along.”
For Tara, who loves wildflowers and sees God's handiwork in them, the image already held meaning. But then she read the words the artist had written for her—
“The desert can be hard, and the journey can feel long.”
—Tara cried because her life has had deserts.
In October of 2020, the life of Tara’s 19-year-old daughter, Isabella, was tragically taken. The person responsible has been convicted and is currently serving a prison sentence, but the years preceding Isabella’s death had already been exceedingly difficult. As a teenager, Isabella struggled with substance use, and Tara and her husband, Kevin, made the difficult decision to seek help through a treatment program. “Every fiber in my body didn’t want to do it,” Tara remembers. But she learned that love doesn't always look like keeping someone close. Sometimes it means making a painful decision in the hope of keeping them safe.
Isabella eventually returned home healthy. She later became a mother, completed her sophomore year at Northwest Vista College, and enrolled at UTSA to study art education. But then came that tragic day.
In the aftermath, Tara and Kevin grieved their daughter while raising their middle school-aged twins, Luke and Eliana, and caring for their six-week-old granddaughter, Annabella, whom they would eventually adopt. “There was something in me that had changed,” Tara says. “Grief is like a thread that’s been woven in me. I would love to pull it out, but it is a part of who I am now.” She describes God as a master weaver, taking the individual strands of a life and creating something impossible to comprehend from the other side. “When you look at the back of a tapestry, it’s really messy,” she says. “But it’s that one colorful thread that helps create the picture of what God is doing.”
Faith for Tara has never meant pretending the pain isn’t there. When Annabella was diagnosed with leukemia (she is currently making progress in her treatment), friends had difficulty understanding another devastating turn for the Bové family. Tara struggled, too. Some days, she admits, she tells God plainly, “I'm really tired, Lord.” So she prays. She worships. She asks for strength. And then she gets up and goes on.
Tara quickly resists any suggestion that she has persevered through her strength alone. Kevin has been her steady companion and encourager, she says. Her mother, sister, family, friends, and church community have prayed, encouraged, and shown up in hospitals and ordinary moments when small acts of kindness mattered enormously. “Although I have been strong,” Tara says, “I believe my strength has come from God and the countless ways people have shown up for our family. I’ll forever be grateful.”
For Tara and Kevin, that foundation is expressed in a Bible passage they held to when they married, in which Jesus describes a house built upon rock. Floodwaters rise around the house, but it stands firm because of its foundation. For the Bové family, the waters have risen more than once. Yet still, they stand. Maybe that’s why Tara continues looking outward.
Before becoming publisher of Boerne Lifestyle Magazine, she worked in senior living, a career that suited her affection for older adults. She supported organizations like World Vision and Living Water International, climbed Mount Kilimanjaro to help secure child sponsorships, and traveled to Rwanda, where she met a child her family supported.
Most recently, she and Luke delivered hundreds of Bibles with a team to remote parts of Peru, including to people who had never seen one in their own language before. There, Luke encouraged Tara to tell her story, something she hadn’t done since Isabella died. She remembers praying, “If it’s one person who needs to hear my story, that it will bring them closer to you or give them hope, then I’m going to share it.”
That same impulse to share life is at the heart of Tara’s vision for Boerne Lifestyle. She hopes the magazine can be a “beacon of light” in the community. “I love that people have so many gifts,” she says. “I’m grateful to be able to share them through the pages of the magazine.” She looks for people quietly doing remarkable things. Artists. Craftspeople. Business owners. Nonprofit leaders. Neighbors whose stories might otherwise be unnoticed. She describes finding them as something of a treasure hunt.
That desire to see people extends to those around her. Tara says she often recognizes strengths in people before they recognize them in themselves, which may also explain why she prefers putting other people in these pages rather than appearing in them herself. But perhaps telling her story is simply another way of doing what she has been doing all along. “There are so many families that have really hard things they’re going through, and people who feel like they’re alone,” she says. If sharing some of her own wilderness helps another person feel less alone, she is willing to do it.
Her challenge is remarkably simple: “I think sometimes people can get lost in their own world and not look up and look outward,” Tara says. In doing so, we may miss the person, need, opportunity, or gratitude directly in front of us. For Tara, looking outward is where faith becomes something more than belief. It becomes love. It becomes service. And, sometimes, somewhere in the desert, it blooms.
Makeup Molly Farris @mollyfarrismakeupartist | 210-630-8509
“Grief is like a thread that’s been woven in me… It's part of who I am now. When you look at the back of a tapestry, it’s really messy, but it’s that one colorful thread that helps create the picture of what God is doing.”