Dawn Damon: My guest today is a passionate and engaging Christian writer. She is also a theology professor and a speaker with over 30 years of experience. She loves empowering women. You're going to hear that today. She wants you to flourish in every season of your life and her heart for serving shines through in every season. Everything she does, whether she's teaching future ministry leaders or guiding women through their unique journeys of faith. Would you please welcome today, my guest, Dr. Evelyn Johnson Taylor.

Hey there, Evelyn!

Evelyn Taylor: Hi, Dawn. I'm so happy to be with you. You're such a chipper person. You just make me happy to be in your presence.

Dawn Damon: Well, thank you. I feel the same way about you. You have such a warm and radiant smile. You're such an accomplished woman, and you don't brag about that. I've known you now for several years, and I have always found you to be so humble and unassuming, yet. So let that not be confused with timid. You are a bold woman of faith, and I'm so, so blessed to know you. So welcome to the Bravehearted Woman, my Bravehearted sister.

Tell us a little bit about yourself. That's kind of a wide-open question, isn't it? But you are a professor of theology. When did you know in your life that you wanted to go into the ministry?

Evelyn Taylor: Well, I grew up in ministry around my, both my parents were in ministry. So it was always a part of my life. Then I married a guy who was already in ministry. When I married, he was a minister in the church. So I felt like I was happy, you know, being a pastor's wife, taking care of my kids, why he went out to do what he did. And then the Lord called me and I said, well, Lord, are you sure? You know, I really need to focus on these girls to make sure they have a firm foundation.

But what happened was women kept coming to me and asking me questions and advice and for counsel and to mentor them. So that's one of the things that I tell people today, if you're not sure what it is, God is calling you to pay attention to the people who come around you, and what they ask from you because many times God will send people to pull out of you what he has put in you. It may not realize it is there are some cases. I think people do realize it. They just don't want to say yes. But people will pull from you what god has placed in you and that's what happened for me. I started off teaching a women's bible study in our home and the women came. They grew, they learned, and in the process I grew, I learned, and it was just such a rewarding experience for them as well as for me. It's just something that I've continued to do over the years, 30 years. My youngest daughter I think at the time was maybe about four or five months old. And so I've been doing that for almost three decades now.

Dawn Damon: Beautiful. I am so inspired really, actually, by what you just said, because, you know, it sounds like, you know, you didn't find your calling. Your calling found you and said. I love that because I believe that women listening right now are being also inspired and they're finding affirmation in your words right now. You said, to pay attention to the people who come around you because they're identifying what the gift is inside of you.

Wow, I still get chills when I say that just now. Then you began to say, okay, Lord, I can't deny that this is how you're using my life. So you said yes to God, you got yourself equipped so that you could be prepared and you, so you did theology school.

Evelyn Taylor: Yes, and that is the exact order. I'm glad you brought that up because one of the things I had said to the Lord is I really don't know how to help them. I don't know how to help the women and the Lord just affirmed in my spirit that. It wasn't up to me. But it was for me to teach his word, and it was the word of God that would change the lives of people.

So what I did was I enrolled in seminary so that I could become equipped as a Bible teacher to teach people the truth of God's word, and be able to explain it in a way that people would understand it. That’s what I did. It took me a while because at the time I was raising two young children. My husband was a young church pastor. It took me a while. I think I started maybe 10 or 15 years later, I walked away with a PhD in ministries, but it was a journey that was worth every effort worth, every sleepless night, every paper, and every DC's dissertation, it was worth it all to be where I am today. And I'm just so grateful for what God has done in my life and how he has used me to help other people, especially women.

Dawn Damon: That's really important. You and I have a very similar story in terms of, I went to Bible school. I didn't go to seminary, but it was. I received my ordination through at the time correspondence school and enrolled in a Bible-accredited school. It took me seven years because I was raising children. So, I never regretted a minute of it, you know, very often. I think that we overestimate what we can do in a short period of time. But we underestimate what we can do in a long period of time.

Evelyn Taylor: So we took your course, stay the course. That's the message to stay the course. I too started out taking online, online classes. It was back in the day when I said online, but it really wasn't through the mail.

Dawn Damon: Yeah.

Evelyn Taylor: They would send you cassettes to listen to and books and then you send your assignments back in in the mail. Yeah,

Dawn Damon: Exactly what I did too, because that call of God, you know, the prophet Jeremiah said, it's like fire shut up in my bones. I mean, the call of God starts to really burn inside of you and you know you're going to be disobedient to God if you don't do something and yet your assignment for the season.

Evelyn Taylor: Yeah, exactly. I'm raising children. I'm raising babies. That's my assignment right now. But while I'm doing that, cause they're napping and they're at school, I'm studying the word of God. So I didn't realize we had allies for so similar in that way.

Dawn Damon: Yeah, I didn't either. That's very cool.

Okay. So I have to ask you a question. First of all, you have to tell us the name of your husband and how you take a marriage proposal over the telephone. You have to share the story.

Evelyn Taylor: Well, my late husband, his name is Scott. He's with the Lord now, but I lived in the Washington DC area for a number of years and had taken a sabbatical from my job to go back home to help my mother who was caring for my father at the time who had been diagnosed with an illness. My husband called me and like, I mean, I talked to a lot of people, guys during that time. You know, I was seeking to be married, but not right then because I had a commitment of what I was doing with my mother helping my mother. He called and we had a great conversation. We prayed together and I kind of forgot about it. But then he called me every day while I was there and actually proposed to me over the phone. That was before the days of no social media. So I had no real way to check him out to verify that he was who he said he was. But he did send me a picture. I sent him a picture. He proposed to me and asked me to marry him over the phone, having never met in person. I said, yes. Then, I went back to Maryland for a friend's wedding. That was the first time we met. He actually gave me an engagement ring the first time we met face-to-face.

Dawn Damon: Oh, my goodness. That is such an amazing story. Okay, you kind of, you kind of breezed over the fact that you were talking to a lot of guys. So did those other guys fall by the wayside?

Evelyn Taylor: I say a lot of guys, but not like a whole lot of guys. I had met guys, let me say it that way. I had met them before. So, he’s like most of the ones that I met. It was one conversation and that was the end of it. So that's what I was expecting from him as well. When he called the next day, I was surprised. Then he called the next day and the next day, two and three times a day. And after about a month's worth of conversations, he asked me to marry him.

Dawn Damon: Wow. Pastor Scott had an intention. He was ready to have your hand in marriage. That's a beautiful story.

So were you guys both like so excited to see each other? No disappointments, everything you imagined?

Evelyn Taylor: Everything and more and more. I mean, I fell first for his voice. Obviously over the phone, such a nice voice, perfect diction, you know, and it turned out to be that that was indeed who he was. I had prayed and asked God for a husband because I did desire to be married. But as I said, at that time, I had kind of put that on the back burner because I was helping my mother with my father. But everything that I had asked God for, I did have a list. And everything that I'd asked God for, hit it right on.

Then one thing I said to the Lord is, I believe he's the one, but I'm not sure. My dad always told us that you can tell how a man will treat you by the way he treats his mother. So when he took me to visit his mom and dad, I saw how respectful, kind, and generous he was with his mother, how affectionate, and how he interacted with her. And that just kind of sealed the deal. I mean, I was already engaged, but I still could have walked away.

Dawn Damon: You still could have walked away, but that sealed the deal. And that's very true, right? If he's respectful to his mother, then you have a good reason to believe that he's going to be respectful to you. And how long were you guys married?

Evelyn Taylor: We were married for 27 years and he went home to be with the Lord and left me. I said, how could he be happy anywhere? That's not with me. But I know that that is something that we all seek to do to be with the Lord. I'm not mad at him. You know, he's just made. He's just there before me.

Dawn Damon: Right. Well, let's talk about that just for a moment because it's been six years since Scott Taylor went to be home with the Lord and you found yourself reevaluating your identity. You were a wife for 27 years. So what about that journey? What did you discover about yourself? What about the lessons learned for you?

Evelyn Taylor: Yes, it was quite strange because I always considered myself to be a fairly independent person and felt like I knew who I was, what I was supposed to be doing, and just felt like I was sure of that. But what happened when he passed away, he had been sick for several years before he died, and I was his caregiver. So we were together all the time. I mean, literally. I mean not literally all the time, but 90% of the time we weren't together. I was with him helping him serving him doing whatever I could to make his life a little easier. Then when he died, I found myself wondering who am I and what am I supposed to be doing.

Who am I now? What would my life look like without him? Because he had been my constant companion for so long. So, it took me on a journey just to rediscover my own identity, who I was. I knew intellectually, you know, I knew that I was who God created me to be. I knew that I still had a purpose and that my life would go on and I would go on to do the things that God had said I would do. But emotionally, I didn't feel that way. I felt like he took my confidence with him when he went to heaven. He took everything that made me who I was with him. So what I did was I set out on a journey to align my feelings with what I knew to be true based on God's word. That was that God still had a plan for my life. His purpose for me had not changed. I still would be and do all that he had called me to do and be so I aligned my emotions with that truth. It took a while. It didn't happen overnight. It took a while, but it was a constant affirmation of who I am and who God says I am. What I will do and what God says I will do. Who I will be and who God says I will be. And just affirming the word of God over my life over and over and over.

Then of course there are people who God always puts in your path who can help you, to assist you, and to encourage you. I had those people around me as well. But it was a journey for me and people grieve differently. But I don't think it is an easy journey for anyone. Some move on quicker than others.

For me, it was important that I sit with that moment and be present at that moment to kind of get some clarity about what was happening, what was going on, and how I was processing the grief and just to embrace where I was. That was important to me. One of the reasons it was important is because I knew that like everything else in my life, God would use that for me to be able to help somebody else. And that if I was going to help somebody, then I needed to get some clarity and some kind of understanding to know what was going on. So, I would be able to tell the next woman how to walk through her journey of grief and loss.

Dawn Damon: It's such wisdom and you have such amazing insight. I talked to a lot of people and I always enjoyed it, but your story your insight your grasp of God's Word and healing, and your identity you have a very deep knowledge. I can tell that and I've known that you know you and I have a second parallel now because I was married for 27 years. Then 28 by the time, the divorce was final my husband left me at 27 years and I had the same thing in terms of it was a different kind of grief, but I grieved deeply. I kept thinking you left me and you're gone and you rejected me. If you died, I could understand it because it wouldn't be what you wanted, but this is what you wanted. You chose this. You just discarded me. I felt so thrown away so small, so useless that I had to align. I had to reframe. And I kept saying to the Lord, I want to heal, right? God, please let me heal, right? Because I know I'm going to use this. I know this is going to preach. It's going to be a testimony right now. I'm not asking for this testimony. I don't want this testimony, but it's come to me. So help me heal, right? So that was the same journey and I had to continue to.

That's not easy to do, is it? We have to reframe. Cast thoughts down. Speak God's truth out loud. And you said, put around you again, people that will elevate you and lift you up and pour into you. We can't do it alone. Can we?

Evelyn Taylor: We can't do it alone

Dawn Damon: And not everybody will understand the path that you take, but you have to know that that is the path. You take and just keep staying the course as we were saying earlier have a new book that came out recently, and its title is In and Out of Seasons.

Evelyn Taylor: One of the things that I do write about in their Dawn is the season or going through the transition of a divorce. Just as you said, I do believe that in some ways it's actually more difficult than one who loses a spouse to death because normally when you are usually when you lose a spouse to death, you don't have that rejection component that comes along with a divorce. So in some cases, I think that can be even more challenging to navigate that season and to transition from something like that. Now, you definitely do take a hit with the rejection, your self-esteem, and your value take a hit in a different way than what the loss of death does. But it's all grief, but it's not forever.

Dawn Damon: I love that you said you had to sit with that for a season. That's Ecclesiastes 3, right? There's a time to rejoice. There's a time to mourn. There's a time to dance and celebrate, and there's a time for lamenting right now. I'm feeling this.

It's important not to get stuck there, but we do go through the valley of the shadow of death and it's painful. But thank you for bringing up your book. You have a new book, In and Out of Seasons. Did I get the title right?

Evelyn Taylor: In and Out of Seasons. It's about transitioning through seasons, just like we're talking about good seasons, and difficult seasons, but thriving in every season.

Dawn Damon: And the book cover, by the way, is smashing. It's outstanding. Beautiful book.

So you talk about these very things. What would you say to someone who might find themselves in a difficult season of life? Talk about what you've written in your book and some of the advice that you give.

Evelyn Taylor: Well, one of the things I would say is to acknowledge where you are, and be honest with yourself about what you're feeling.

In the book, I do share not only just challenging seasons. But I do talk about when I got married as well in the book and how that was a new season for me. Sometimes even when we are moving into a good place, we don't want to leave where we are just because we are comfortable and it's familiar to us. Certainly, you know, marriage for me was something that I had prayed for, had longed for, and was very excited about. But even in that, it required some transitioning because you have two adults coming together who have pretty much governed their own lives separately, and then they have to combine those lives. It's not always an easy thing to do. So there are always transitions that we go through in life. Even when we're leaving a place or going to a place that we may be long to go to, there's still a transition.

So I would say, first of all, acknowledge where you are and just embrace where you are and get an understanding of why and what you need to do in that season. When you get some clarity, maybe of why you're there, embrace the process of the journey. Because there's so much that we learn as we process through life and journey through life. Sometimes we try and move quickly and forget, or even push down what we're feeling and not acknowledge it. But I think when we embrace it, acknowledge it, allow it to surface, and then there's something that we can learn.

And anything that we learn in one season almost guarantees to help us in another season. So learn the lesson in one season. Then you have that benefit of what you learn in the next season.

Dawn Damon: Yes. Embrace that wisdom, extract that lesson, and apply it to the data bank up here.

You know, you talk about it's even if it's a good transition, a happy transition, it's still a brain shock. It's a culture shock. It does something, even neuroscience in our brain. We now understand how much our brain loves familiarity. When something is different, it's like, wow, a threat warning, detect, and abort. You know, your brain wants to drag you back to what is comfortable. I know I experienced that when I also remarried my husband, and it was beautiful and so exciting and so thrilling. But there were moments where it was like, I miss my house. I miss my dog. I miss, you know, there were still parts of my life that were different. And those are things sometimes we don't want to say out loud, but it's true.

Evelyn Taylor: True.

Dawn Damon: Yeah. I love you, honey, but I really miss my dog. But yes, I know that probably sounds like, but yeah, I've always, always, always an animal person. Then in this season of life, it just didn't make practical sense for us because we travel all the time. So new things, a new season.

So in this book, In and Out of Seasons, transitioning through different seasons of our life, being aware is usually always the first step. Pretty much anything, isn't it? Acknowledge where you are and don't deny that you're experiencing and feeling what you're feeling. I'm sure that your book is available on Amazon and all of the usual suspects or they can get it from your website perhaps. But what are you hoping that the reader do, is it for women only? Is it for men and women?

Evelyn Taylor: Well, it is for anyone and I know a big question came up about the cover because there's a female on the cover and a man did ask me, is this book for men too? My audience is women. I know that, confident of that, but the book is also for men because my thoughts are if the woman is happy, then. There you go. You will be happy as a man. So get the book, you know, male or female.

But obviously I want readers to be encouraged by it. I want them to be inspired, and empowered. But most of all, I want them to be comforted, to know that no matter what season of life they're in, whether it be a hard season or not-so-good season or even a good season they're not alone. That there are people who have walked this journey before them. And even if it's just in the pages of the book, I want them to know that I know their story.

I understand I've been there so that they feel some comfort knowing that they're not alone. I think that the number one thing that I want readers to take away from the book is feeling comfortable, comfort, I should say not comfortable, but some comfort and knowing that I am not alone. Here is someone who has been through some seasons of her life and she has continued and is growing and is moving forward. And if she can do it, so can I.

Dawn Damon: Yes, that is a magnificent takeaway. In this world today, don't we need comfort? Don't we need that hope to say, I'm going to make it? There's a lot of anxiety and depression going around, but God is in control of his universe. He's in control. We let not your heart be troubled.

So I'm so thankful that you were with us today. Tell us where we can find you. You do have a Facebook group. Am I right? Where do you talk?

Evelyn Taylor: I do have a Facebook group. It's called the Value of the Season. I started this group probably about six years ago because I knew that there were other people struggling, trying to move from hard seasons. I wanted to reach out to them and let them know that there's value in every season. There's something to be learned from what we were talking about earlier. And so not minimize that, but embrace where they are and learn all they can while they're there. And that is a group that I started, but if people want to reach me, my website is evelynjtaylor.org. The book is available via Amazon or online bookstores, or if you don't see it in your bookstore, they can get it for you there. My Facebook page is Dr. Evelyn Johnson Taylor.

Dawn Damon: My guest today is Dr. Evelyn Johnson Taylor. Thank you so much for being with us on the Bravehearted Woman.

You are a bravehearted woman. Any last word to our listeners?

Evelyn Taylor: Well, thank you, Dawn, for having me. I appreciate that, but I would like to just encourage those who are listening to let them know that the plan that God has for your life remains intact. It doesn't change just because the seasons change. God is steady. He's steadfast, unmovable. So just remain faithful and he will give you direction and clarity of the next steps for you.

Dawn Damon: Double amen. Yes and Amen. Hallelujah. I feel like we should take an offering now. I feel like I've been in church.

Oh, you beautiful, bravehearted women. Thank you so much for joining me. This is Dawn Damon, Braveheart mentor, and I am going to leave you like I always do. This is your moment to find your brave and live your dreams!