When Your World Ends: God’s Creative Process for Rebuilding a Life

is an author, Bible teacher, and associate minister at First Baptist Church of Glenarden specializing in helping individuals rebuild their lives after experiencing devastating loss or life-altering circumstances. Her expertise lies in: Biblical Strategies for Life Renewal: Dawn offers insights on applying God’s Creative Process, as revealed in Genesis, to personal transformation and rebuilding. Overcoming Adversity through Faith: She shares practical, biblically-based approaches to navigate life’s unexpected challenges and emerge stronger. Empowering Women in Ministry: As an associate minister and leader at a large church, Dawn has experience in guiding women to find their purpose and strength through faith. Expository Teaching on Resilience: Dawn’s passion for expository teaching allows her to break down complex biblical concepts into actionable steps for personal growth and healing.

 

The Interview Transcript

Hugh Ballou:
Welcome to this episode of The Nonprofit Exchange, where we interview guests every week who have special stories, special backgrounds, special experiences, and some wisdom to share from those experiences. So, my guest, number 430 out of the series, but it’s like a fresh start every week, Dawn Sanders. So, Dawn, welcome to the Nonprofit Exchange. Tell people a little bit about who you are, your background, and your passion for the work that you do.

Dawn Sanders:
Hi. I’m a Bible teacher, newly published author, and an associate minister at the First Baptist Church of Glen Arden in Glen Arden, Maryland. and a little bit about what I do. I help people rebuild their lives after a catastrophic or a soul-crushing disappointment. And what led me to doing this is I’ve had a number of soul-crushing disappointments, unexpected situations, life transitions, catastrophic events in my own life, like a divorce. I’m a widow. miscarriages in the eight months before my husband passed away. And so I have had simultaneous, consecutive, and multiple catastrophic events happen in my life.

Hugh Ballou:
And so how have those events shaped your vision as a leader?

Dawn Sanders:
It’s funny that you would ask immediately about being a leader. I didn’t feel as much as a leader when I was going through my divorce, but I had been licensed by the time my husband, my second husband passed away. And I realized something as a result of that is that At least for me, and I think for many others, especially in America, we’re kind of given this checklist about how life is going to go. Meaning, you know, you finish high school, you go on to college, possibly start, you know, your career, get married, buy a home, have kids, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. And all of these things, when you’re a young person, you embrace this list with these one-time events. I’m going to get married once. I’m going to go to college once. I’m going to buy a house once. I’m going to do all these things. And we feel like we check these boxes. But then when you have these soul-crushing disappointments, it’s because one of those boxes is now empty that you had previously filled. And when that happened to me as a leader, I really wasn’t expecting it, right? I had some level of accomplishment in my life and I didn’t expect to be feeling as disappointed, lost, hurt, betrayed, teased, broken as I was feeling following these miscarriages, following the death of my husband, losing basically the dream I had for what my life was going to look like according to Dawn.

Hugh Ballou:
You are a joyful, expressive person. And yes, some people would be wounded. I have a psychologist friend that says, some people live life to the level of their dreams, while other people live life to the level of their wounds. And you’re not a wounded person, but you’ve been shaped by those experiences, right?

Dawn Sanders:
I’m not wounded anymore. I’m healed now. I was wounded. I have been hurt. I have been hurt. I have the scars to prove it. So I have been wounded, but I think I’m very thankful that I’ve healed from those wounds. And that’s what my book is about. It’s a process, a seven step process on how we can heal. from the wounds that we experience when we have these life-altering events and we’re now sitting there going, I once, and this is what I mean about being a leader, I once had these tools that worked for me. I checked this box before. Why am I struggling to check it now?

Hugh Ballou:
What if you don’t check it? Is that okay?

Dawn Sanders:
Oh yeah, it’s okay to not check it if that’s your desire. I mean, everyone has their own, and maybe I shouldn’t say checklist, right? I’m gonna say checklist. Everyone has their own things that they’re hoping to accomplish in their life. And so the things that are on my list might not necessarily be on your list.

Hugh Ballou:
So that’s interesting. I find that I talk to a whole lot of people, and I work with a lot of people who want to have an advisor for growing their skill set as a leader. But I find that many people have self-imposed limits. And we’re harder on ourselves than anybody else would be. So that checklist, is that something you learned from other people? You felt like it was imposed on you? Or did you come up with that list yourself?

Dawn Sanders:
For me personally, I think it was a little of both because there were things that my father, God rest his soul, wanted me to do that I did not choose for myself. But then there were other things that my family, the context in which I grew up in and the experiences that I had helped shape and direct me in certain ways. But then there were other things that I was like, yeah, no, that’s not for me.

Hugh Ballou:
We make our own choices and, you know, some of the things that happened to us do shape us. And I, what I’m hearing you say is you get to decide, we get to decide how it’s going to shape us. Right.

Dawn Sanders:
Yeah.

Hugh Ballou:
So do you happen to have a copy of your book handy? I know the answer to this.

Dawn Sanders:
I, I do.

Hugh Ballou:
When it’s called world ends.

Dawn Sanders:
Yeah.

Hugh Ballou:
What will we find in that book?

Dawn Sanders:
You’ll find a seven step process on how to rebuild your life after you have had a challenging situation happen in your life. Or you could also use it just for any life transition. It doesn’t necessarily have to be challenging, but it targets people who are challenged.

Hugh Ballou:
We all have transitions, don’t we?

Dawn Sanders:
Yeah. More often than many of us care to recognize. I say to people all the time now, I didn’t say it as much before, but now I say the only thing constant in life is change.

Hugh Ballou:
That’s the only thing that doesn’t change. It’s changed itself. That’s right. And so tell us, unpack the book a little bit more. What are the chapters and what’s the journey as we read the book?

Dawn Sanders:
Oh, well, the book opens with my story, shares how I lost my husband and how when I lost my husband, I didn’t want to go on at first and I struggled in the beginning. And then one day I woke up and to be honest with you, Hugh, I was just sick and tired of feeling sick and tired and basically realized that As much as at one time I didn’t want to go on, I was still waking up every morning. And so I woke up one morning and went, OK, I’m going to be here. It looks like I’m going to be here, whether I want to be here or not. And if I’m going to be here, then I just felt like I needed to enjoy my life more than I was enjoying it during that season. And that I needed to regain my agency and my power, which I had felt was stripped from me, but it wasn’t, I just wasn’t activating it the way I could. And then it goes into, like I said, a seven step process. And the seven step process comes from Genesis one. As I said, I’m an associate minister. And so the book is a deep dive into the, Genesis story, the creation story in Genesis 1. And I saw in that story that at the beginning of the story, the world before God began to create was described as without form, void, and dark. And that description described also how I was feeling. In the days after my husband’s death, my life without form, chaos, no structure to my life. It was empty and lifeless, and it was dark. But at the end of the story, God had created the first two lives. And that’s where I saw the fact that we could create a new life. And he had blessed them to be fruitful and multiply. had directed them to enter his rest. And I was like, I need to dig deeper into this passage because I would like a whole lot more of the blessings and the rest than the chaos and the emptiness.

Hugh Ballou:
Go a little deeper into why you wrote the book and who did you write it for?

Dawn Sanders:
Well, like I said, I struggled. When I was going through, after I finished grieving in particular, I found a lot of really good books on how to grieve. But I didn’t find as many on how to rebuild after you had finished grieving. And before I had gone through this particular grieving cycle, I didn’t even realize they were different. I thought you grieved and rebuilt kind of at the same time, but you really don’t. At least in my experience, you don’t do either one well if you’re busy doing both at the same time, right? And that you rebuild better if you allow yourself to grieve fully, and that you grieve better if you aren’t busy trying to move forward that if you just take the time to feel your grief, that you get through it. Instead, if you don’t grieve, it’ll fester, right? And many of us want to, and to be honest with you, I’m a type A person, and so if I have stuff to do, right, I will do stuff before feeling stuff. As much as I say that, there are times when I have felt things so deeply, and the loss of my husband was one of these occasions where, like I said, I couldn’t get out of the bed. But eventually, that feeling passed. And then I was sitting there going, so what do I do now? I’m no longer grieving. How do I put my life back together now? How do I check the boxes that I, at this point in time in my life, want to check? Because I’m not trying to check all of them anymore. Like you said, that list changes. Not only are people’s lists different, but they change over time too. And that’s another thing. It’s like you get this list at the beginning and you think, oh, that’s the list everybody’s gonna have and I’m gonna have it forever and I can’t change it. And yeah, like you said before, we can change it. And not only can we, I am finding that you can change it multiple times, not just once.

Hugh Ballou:
And maybe it’s not a measure of quality or good or bad or success or not, whether you check every item on somebody else’s list. So I bet you redid your own list after that.

Dawn Sanders:
I did. I did. And that was part of the process too, right? Step one was about that grieving was to hover in Genesis verse two, it says that God hovered. And so that’s what I mean by not being in a hurry to just move through this grieving process. There’s a purpose for grieving and it’s to heal. It’s to heal our emotional wounds. None of us would go around with a gaping cut that never healed. I mean, not desiring to do so. We would want that cut to scab over and to heal completely. We wouldn’t want it to just fester. No, and the same is true about our emotional wounds. We don’t want them to just fester either. It is much better to allow, just give yourself the time to heal them. And then once they’re healed, a lot of people told me when my husband first passed away, don’t make any major life decisions right now. And it was because I was grieving. I was in my emotions as they say today. And we make much better decisions when we aren’t being ruled by our emotions. I’m not saying you can’t feel an emotion after you’re grieving, but you’re not ruled by those emotions.

Hugh Ballou:
Well, our emotions inform our thinking.

Dawn Sanders:
Exactly.

Hugh Ballou:
We make thinking decisions, you know, we take them to the emotions, but we can’t afford to run our lives by emotional decision making.

Dawn Sanders:
Exactly.

Hugh Ballou:
Well, the wisdom that I’m hearing in many, many ways is one track is there’s a process for grieving. There are various steps that you talk about in your book. I know there’s steps to grieving. And I know that if you don’t go through those steps, you will never let go of the grief.

Dawn Sanders:
Yeah, I talk about the spiritual disciplines and how the spiritual disciplines are helpful for processing your emotions. Spiritual disciplines like prayer, meditation, solitude, and silence. Like I said before, being a type A person, solitude and silence aren’t always first on my list, right? And at that time, right after my husband died, My brain was loud. There was a lot, like I said, chaos. There was a lot of conversations going on at one time. I wasn’t even sure which were mine. I had to let my brain quiet so that I could figure out what was my voice saying versus all the other voices in my head. And here’s an example. I went to church one day and another minister because she saw me moving around and not crying and broken down, she said she’s not grieving. She didn’t understand that I had been in bed all day that day and that the service started at seven and I didn’t get up until 7.30 and I didn’t walk through the doors until like two minutes before it started. But yet she was saying I wasn’t grieving because she didn’t see it. Right? And so, and that was hard for me because like I said, part of the reason why I was going to church was to be around people, but I needed to be by myself some, right? So that I could get these other voices out of my head, other voices that, and I’m not trying to, you know, knock or tear down this minister, I believe she meant well. Because like I said, we do need to grieve. And she cared enough to be even paying attention to me. But we’re all human, and we make mistakes. And she got this one wrong. I was grieving. And so I had to say, don’t listen to that voice.

Hugh Ballou:
And we make these judgment calls about other people not really knowing what’s going on. And, you know, I learned some things in business groups that I should have learned in church. You know, when, you know, going to a business networking group, they said, don’t ask for anything, ask other people what they’re doing and what they need. And the brilliance of that is instead of me trying to find out of 400 people, some idea that could fulfill my needs, they’re all coming and asking me. So, I’m thinking that your book is an awareness journey, probably for leaders in any community, especially communities of faith, whether you’re Christian or Jewish, or Genesis belongs to all of us. So, it would occur to me that this is a journey that those people that are in leadership, whether it’s ministry or local charities or whatever, and we do have people listening to this or watching this that are in those, it would occur to me this would be a good awareness book and maybe a group book to read and discuss it. What do you think about that?

Dawn Sanders:
I would agree wholeheartedly. In fact, in that chapter where I was talking about spiritual disciplines, it is very much an awareness thing. I talk about becoming aware of how we’re feeling and not just about the loss, how we’re feeling about having to even craft a new life. I like the life I had before, right? And the fact that I have to now put forth the energy because I had checked these boxes. I don’t want to have to check them again. And how I feel about doing that and how I feel about having to come up with a new checklist. I had developed a checklist. I had done this stuff before. And if you’re like me, you don’t want to have to do things over again. I was like, why am I doing this over again? But now I see it differently. I’m doing it over again because I have checked those boxes. And if the list is only so long, so if we check those boxes and they stay checked, then what do we do with the rest of our lives? Are we just going to like curl up in a ball and die because I’ve now checked off all my boxes?

Hugh Ballou:
No, no. And as another type A personality, I get that, you know, I got to be sure that people squeeze the toothpaste from the bottom of the tube, you know, that kind of thing. I’m also type one enneagram, which, you know, those two things kind of, oh, amplify each other and oldest brother, brothers, so that we have lots of personality things that we don’t really understand about each other. So do you have other, other intellectual property besides the book that supports what the book does?

Dawn Sanders:
I’m in the process of developing a meditations starter kit and a prayer routine starter kit because it’s my experience, not just personally, but ministering to other people. that when you go through these events, it can be hard to focus and to concentrate. And so I’m starting with this meditation starter kit that has meditations that are only like a minute, two minutes long. They’re scripture-based that can help people get through the initial season of confusion, right? When they’re trying to figure things out and just help them focus a little better on things. And then the prayer routine starter kit, personally for me, losing my husband totally derailed my prayer life. And so I needed to start over with that too. And what I found is that for some of us, because we have attained a certain level in things, right, for me, I would pray for several minutes, right? I won’t necessarily share how long, and I journaled, and I would journal several pages and all of this. But then after my husband passed away, some days all I would write in my journal was the date if I wrote anything at all, right? beating myself up because, oh, I can’t write the many pages I used to write, and being okay with starting over, and that starting over means it’s small now. You might have been doing some big things before, but it’s okay to do small things after having done big things. Everything doesn’t have to just get bigger and bigger and bigger to have value.

Hugh Ballou:
Here’s a request from me. I’m thinking also, in addition to what you’ve already created, which are great assets for people, maybe a study guide, if people wanted to do this as a group, who you book and talk about it, because it just occurs to me, there’s a whole lot of people that deal with this that we never know about it.

Dawn Sanders:
I am working on a study guide, but I will say this, though, the book itself at the It contains a seven step process and those seven chapters that have the process in it at the end of the chapter, there are journal and discussion questions where people don’t have to wait for the study guide to have study. Study discussions or group discussions around the content of the book.

Hugh Ballou:
Well, That’s good news. That’s good news. And the book is available now. So, I’m showing your website. Now, there are some people that are on listen-only mode. So, it’s Don Mann, with two N’s, Sanders, D-A-W-N-M-A-N-N-S-A-N-D-E-R-S.com is your website. So, when people go there, what will they find?

Dawn Sanders:
Well, if you scroll up at the very top of the screen is a quiz. And the quiz is, what’s your start over style? And if you complete this quiz, it’ll give you the results. There’s five different types of results that you could possibly have for my quiz as your start over style. And so you could complete that, and you would get your results. And along with your results come three action steps that you can begin taking today.

Hugh Ballou:
Oh, there’s your menu. I just said drop down menu. That’s brilliant. Yeah.

Dawn Sanders:
Yeah. And then the menu shows you, so it says articles. That’s my blog. Then there’s a page for the book. There’s another way that you can get to the quiz. There’s a page for my speaking, um, where you can let me know if you would like to have me come out and speak. And then resources are, um, a few free resources that I’ve made available, a couple of devotionals and, um, an ebook.

Hugh Ballou:
And there’s a contact button. So when people fill that out, I’m sure you get back to them, right?

Dawn Sanders:
Yep. I sure do.

Hugh Ballou:
Well, that’s a well done website. I see a lot of websites and not every one of them is that inviting, shall we say, and concise. There’s not too much there. Is there anything that I didn’t ask you that you want people to know about you in the book?

Dawn Sanders:
It’s available wherever books are sold, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, IVP, Target, Walmart, and several other locations.

Hugh Ballou:
And who should buy the book? Who should go right now and buy that book?

Dawn Sanders:
Leaders who have been through life changes, who would like strategies and tools on how to navigate that season of their lives.

Hugh Ballou:
and maybe leaders who haven’t been through that so they can understand it. Especially if you’re leading other people, there’s a high probability that some of those people are in that situation.

Dawn Sanders:
That’s true. And so I’ve had a lot of coaches and counselors tell me how useful the book is and that they’ll be sharing it with their clients.

Hugh Ballou:
That’s another market if you’re working with others as a coach. That’s very helpful to have this perspective. So Dawn, what do you want to leave people with, a thought or a challenge or a tip today?

Dawn Sanders:
That if your life doesn’t look the way that you thought it was going to look earlier, that there’s still hope. That your life can still be good, even if it didn’t turn out the way you thought it was going to turn out. and you can be an active participant in making that happen.

Hugh Ballou:
You can be an active participant in your own life. You would think people would understand that, but we don’t, do we?

Dawn Sanders:
So many of us just drift through life without being an active participant, and then get upset because all of these different things happen to us. I remember watching an episode of Battlestar Galactica, and I’m dating myself because it was the original. where a Klingon was flying and it crashed. And when they found the Klingon, the Klingon said, I was just flying and the ground came up and hit me. And that’s how many of us go through life, is we think the ground came up and hit us.

Hugh Ballou:
Well, Don Mann Sanders, you’ve been a welcome guest today on the non-profit exchange. You’ve helped me get a new paradigm on this, this whole space that you’re talking about grieving and recovering and resetting the bar. Cause you know, the best part of our life is yet to come. And you’ve just shared that with us.

Dawn Sanders:
Yep. It can get better.

Hugh Ballou:
Thank you so much for being my guest today.

Dawn Sanders:
Thank you so much for having me.