As Bob Zook sat in his recliner early that morning of Feb. 22, 2024, crushing fatigue pressed hard on his frail body. He had struggled to the coffee maker and then to his favorite chair. Every morning, steaming java in hand, he would sit down, fully on his terms. That day, though, simple physics prevailed over human will. By God’s grace Bob had landed safely in the chair, but he had essentially fallen into it. 

Ever the problem solver, Bob’s mind switched to planning mode. A retired Pentagon budget analyst, he had always relied on carefully laid plans. But in that moment, his mind locked onto a promise he believes God spoke to him in 2003, when he faced a rare form of retinal cancer and limited treatment options: “I’ve got this.” And an almost audible question seemed to quickly follow: “Do you understand?”

God had brought him successfully through that bout with retinal cancer. Then in 2019, the first of five relapses with metastatic prostate cancer began. And now here he was, in early 2024, absolutely bowled over physically. The tomographic radiation treatments plus a new drug protocol from the day before had had massive side effects.

“It was a monumental heaviness several orders of magnitude beyond what I had experienced before, and it left me astonishingly weak,” Bob recalled.

His wife, Margaret, whom he met while both were working as budget analysts for the Department of the Air Force in Dayton, Ohio, and who retired alongside him from the Pentagon in 2001, said her normally fit and youthful-looking husband, then 77, had left the hospital from his treatments looking like he’d aged years in a few days.

So severe was his condition, she said, “He looked like he was 100 years old. I was scared, so much so that I was afraid to go to sleep that night because I was afraid he would die.”

The next morning, Bob, the 5 a.m. riser, had willed his way out of bed. As he sat in his chair and reflected on the question, “Do you understand?” he began praying. He sensed God gently remind him to relinquish any illusions of his own control and trust God completely. As he continued praying and thanking God for His sovereignty, he recalls a rushing sense of peace. Realizing his coffee cup was empty, he rose to refill it and was stunned to discover that the fatigue was gone.

“God stilled the perfect storm that produced that awful fatigue,” Bob said. When Margaret arose an hour or so later, she walked into the room and was floored by Bob’s appearance. 

“I mean, my mouth dropped open,” Margaret recalled. “I couldn’t believe it was the same person.”

A year later, the metastatic prostate cancer is an ongoing threat. Bob is simultaneously fighting back pain from a ruptured disc. But the Zooks’ trust in God’s sovereign rule overrides the burden of any temporary infirmity, they said.

He Is Trustworthy

God’s trustworthiness has been a theme in their lives. Bob, who grew up in a faithful Methodist family in Michigan, had watershed moments in which the assurance of his saving faith was tested and confirmed. A few weeks after graduating from the University of Michigan in late 1968, Bob enlisted in the Air Force; a few months later he headed to Vietnam. He survived a tour of duty there unscathed, escaping a building the North Vietnamese tried to blow up. 

Margaret fondly remembers her conversion in a Free Methodist church in her home state of Kentucky as a young girl. In that small-town church, she said the Lord faithfully surrounded her with godly people. It’s where she first remembers hearing about Billy Graham. Margaret went to work for the Department of the Air Force in Dayton, where she met Bob and they eventually married.   

Later, the Lord orchestrated a move to Washington, D.C., with Bob at the Pentagon and Margaret at the Navy Yard. After a while, Margaret joined Bob at the Pentagon. During that period, they began attending a church that practiced believer’s baptism. Having never done so as believers, the Zooks were baptized together on Easter Sunday 1989—an event they look back on as a moment of further surrender to Christ. 

In the mid-1990s, the Zooks met Franklin Graham when he was at the Pentagon as a guest speaker for a group called Christian Embassy, and that began a relationship between the Zooks and the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. 

On Sept. 4, 2001—one week to the day and almost to the hour before the 9/11 attacks—Pentagon officials held a retirement ceremony for the Zooks. The following Tuesday, terrorists crashed an airliner into a recently renovated area of the Pentagon, just around the corner from where Margaret’s office had been. The dead numbered 184, including a woman who had worked for Bob, and the mayhem would have been worse had that wing not been mostly vacated for renovations. 

Whether it was God sparing their lives at the Pentagon by a matter of a few days, getting Bob to the right doctors at just the right time, helping him escape what should have been a deadly blast in Vietnam, or causing the crushing effects of cancer treatments to subside in a moment, God has always been right by  Bob and Margaret’s side. And they give Him the glory and thanksgiving.

Reflecting on that morning in the recliner, Bob said: “To get ahead of God was kind of trespassing on God’s authority. When He says ‘I’ve got this,’ He’s got it—100 percent.” ©2025 BGEA

Photographs: Courtesy of Margaret Zook