The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – With All Your Heart: Trusting God Through Every Season by Marion Dunkerley

Episode Date: June 22, 2026

With All Your Heart: Trusting God Through Every Season by Marion Dunkerley https://www.amazon.com/All-Your-Heart-Trusting-Through/dp/B0GW9Q6TMR Mariondunkerley.com With All Your Heart: Trusting God Through Every Season is a journey through Proverbs 3:5-6 that guides readers to trust God with their whole hearts, lean not on their own understanding, and experience His direction through all of life’s seasons, even when it feels uncertain or difficult. In With All Your Heart: Trusting God Through Every Season, readers are invited to explore Proverbs 3:5-6 as a roadmap for living a life of full and complete trust in God. Through real-life stories, testimonies, biblical insights, and practical reflections, this book empowers readers to surrender control, trust God’s wisdom, and find peace amidst life’s challenges. Whether facing illness, loss, or simply the ordinary struggles of daily life, this book shows how trusting God can bring hope, strength, and guidance for every season.

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With expert publishing to strategic marketing, they help authors reach their audience and maximize their book's success. Today we have an amazing young lady on the show. We're going to be talking about her books and insights on the show. Her book is entitled, With All Your Heart, Trusting God Through Every Season by Marion Dunkley. We're going to get into with her and find all the deeds on her book and some of the things that she's working on today.

She's a pastor's wife, a parent, grandparent, nurse educator, writer, and woman of faith, whose life and work have been shaped by a deep desire to encourage others to trust God more fully. Through her years of teaching and mentoring nursing students, she has sought to model compassion, perseverance, and Christ-centered care. Her book grew out of a personal journey of learning to trust the Lord through uncertainty, surrender, and suffering. Since the writing of the book, she's experienced several additional tests for face and trusting God through health, self-backs and challenges, deepening the message she shares with readers as she continues to apply these truths to her own journey. Welcome the show. How are you, Marion? I'm doing well, thanks. Thank you, and thanks for coming.

Give us dot com's website, social media, wherever you want people to get to know you better on the internet. I do have a website, and it's Marian Dunkerly.com. and then on Facebook it's Marion Dunkerly Books, which is also linked to Instagram, and I also have a LinkedIn. Let's try that one again, LinkedIn account. So people can find you there as well.

Give us a 30,000 review, please, of what's inside your book? All right. It came about because the provost of the university that I was employed at gave us a word as the faculty every year that was like the theme of the year. And in the 2024, 2025 year, the word was trust based on Proverbs 3, 5, and 6. And it was a great thing, but I didn't realize at the time how much I was going to need that word in the weeks and months to come. Oh, so what happened?

So I was diagnosed with two and then eventually three forms of leukemia. Oh, no. And it felt like I was put on a shelf so emotionally spiraled down. Yeah. But it was almost like God was tapping me on the shoulder. There's a passage in the Old Testament where he speaks about a still small voice. And it was just a voice that says, trust me, trust me, trust me. So I began to delve into what does it mean to trust God, gathered a whole bunch of literature about it, looked at the Bible, and the book ended up writing itself.

Wow. And this is your first book you've ever written. This is my first book, yeah. That makes it easy when it comes to you, cleaning fast and simple and easy. Some people have characters or inspiration that comes to them. Some people have to just create out a whole cloth by just working it, working the clay and making it come together. So that's really good. And so you put this book out here. What do you hope to achieve with the book or readers come away with? What I really hope is that this book can get into the hands of anybody who struggles with any form of trust.

And in reality, that's probably most, if not all of us. The book doesn't just talk about me. It's not really about me. It's about trusting God. And yes, there are some examples in the book. of parts of my journey, but there are also examples of contemporary people, like Johnny Ericson Tata, for example, who have struggled with trusting God, especially early in her time, and I met her early on, people like, oh, what's his name, Horatio, who wrote, it is well

with my soul. He, they, the boat was going over the place where his child, he, he, they, the boat was going over the place where his children had perished. And he wrote a song about, I'm trusting you, Lord, even though there is so much pain and so much uncertainty going on. Other examples, contemporary ones would be like Corey Timbom. And she was the weaker truster. Her sister, Betsy, was really the one who had the stronger faith. And yet God used Corey in such an amazing way in the years after.

the World War II. Yeah, yeah. And so these were stories that inspired you in writing the book? Yeah. They were examples of people who placed their full trust in God. George Mueller, who ran an orphanage, and they didn't ask for money except for from God, and every single day, God provided what they needed. Wow.

That explains. He's the bad with money, because it's always asking. asking for it. That's a joke. I need more. And you're like, what did you do with this stuff I gave you the last week, man? It's like when I live in Vegas and I meet people with the gambling addiction. But no, that's learning to trust, learning. Part of that probably has to do with faith. Is faith and trust connected? Those two? Yeah, they're integrally connected. Almost maybe the same word you could use. Do you think, or is that not? It would be the same word. And faithful would probably be one of the keywords that would represent what's in this book.

Because if I trust in God, and the first six chapters take that apart, but if I trust in God holy and completely, then I can depend on him to be faithful to lead me, to guide me, to direct my path. And what if you don't trust him? What happens then? There are times when it's really hard to trust God. And there's a verse in the Bible that talks, I believe, help me with my unbelief. And so even just taking one small step forward and saying, I'm overwhelmed, God, I'm scared, I have been betrayed more times than I can count. Where are you, God?

Hey, trust me, I'm here. I'm walking alongside you. I will never let you go in the darkest of times when you feel like you're in the abyss. I will be with you. I will be carrying you when you are too weak to walk. So it's got to be hard being diagnosed with a disease like leukemia. I had a dog that got leukemia. I've had ones that have any cancer.

And it's got to be hard dealing with, if God's so great and if God's so cool, why is he allowing this to happen to me? Is that some of the things that go through your head where you're, you struggle with faith and, and maybe truth initially or trust initially where before you went on this journey and wrote the book, you were, you're struggling with, why me? I'm supposed to be good. I did all the right things. We live in a sinful world. And we've all fall short of the glory of God.

And God didn't give me cancer. He allowed cancer in my life to test me, to test if I could trust in him. In the book, I do give an example of a friend, a very dear friend who's really struggling with a different form of cancer. And just last week got some very, very disheartening news. And he asked me, why? Why would God allow this? But the very next sentence he said to me is, God is always. wise, God is faithful. God is, his plan for us is perfect. And so my job is not to grumble about why.

I think Job asked why. And God didn't ever tell him why. He just told him, hey, look at me, I'm God. I created all this. So my job is not to ask God why, but rather to say, hey, God, how can I glorify you? How can I edify you to others? How can I build others up in the midst of my circumstances? And it says pray without ceasing and thank God in your circumstances. And that's what I try to do. I think part of the book is a way of encouraging others.

And I'm the one who needed it the most. Yeah. I'm the one when when the setbacks came. I'm the one who had to say, hey, God, I guess I really need to re-read some of these words because I need to trust you in this situation. Yeah. Yeah. Now, you chose Proverbs three verse or chapter three, verse five through six as the foundation for the book. Tell us about that and how that came about and played through.

As I mentioned, the provost started it with the annual word, and then it just became something that I really needed to delve further into. So I took the book apart or the verses apart. Okay, what is trust from a human perspective, from a technical perspective, looking at how we trust others, looking at servant leadership and how the leaders. that we have, that we trust the most are those who serve us. And how do we trust God? We have this horizontal trust. What about this vertical trust? What can we do with that? What does that mean in terms of relating to God and yielding to Him? So trust God with all your heart, which is the title of the book. There are people, and I am probably among them at times in my life. who will trust God partially.

I'll take this part, but I'm going to hold this onto this really tightly. I'll place it at the feet of your throne, and then I'll take it back. And that's a human tendency, and I've been guilty of doing that many, many times. But what God wants of us out of that verse is to do it wholly and completely with no reservations, giving, not giving it back, not taking it back, but giving it all to him. And then leaning into God instead of leaning out, very often we as believers or as people, the last thing we'll go to as God. We'll try everything else.

And I could make a big long laundry list of things that people will try to do in lieu of God. But in the end, he's the only one that's faithful. So when circumstances are good or when circumstances aren't good, what we need to do is lean into him, knowing that we can trust him, knowing that people are going to let us down. And everybody has multiple stories, I'm sure, of times they've been let down by other people. Oh, yeah. But God will never let us down, not ever. So you lean into God rather than leaning away from God and choosing to do Him last. And in all your ways, acknowledge him, in all your ways, recognize that like Peter, when he put his eyes on Jesus, when he was walking across the water, Peter walked on the water.

And the moment that he took his eyes off of Jesus, he began to fall. So if I acknowledge Jesus and I keep my eyes on him like in Colossians 3, 1, and 2, then I can hypothetically walk on water with Jesus. Yeah. Then the very end of it is that he will direct your paths or other versions say he will make your path straight, that if I acknowledge that he's wiser than I am, that if I depended on myself, I would only blow it, but when I depend on him, he's going to guide me in the right direction, even when it's not what I planned or what I wanted. I didn't want cancer.

Yeah. And I never have been my choice. But at the same time, I have learned so much in this last 20 months about who God is. And I've been able to take that and encourage others as well. And the fair is that the book will do the same thing. Has the book been cathartic? Has it helped to write the book as you're going through this experience, giving you strength, maybe, giving you perspective? Tell us some of the ways that it's maybe helped you in just writing the book and sharing it with people.

After chapter six, there's a whole, I think another, like another eight chapters that talk about the circumstances. I have had periods, long periods of uncertainty where you're waiting and you don't know the answer. Can I continue to trust in God or am I going to say, God, where are you and why haven't you fixed this yet? And a lot of people do that. But if I lean into God, then I can trust him. And I've tried to do that during these last 20 months. There have been times where, wait a minute, wait a minute, I thought that this was your plan. plan. Oh, his plans are much wiser than my plan. And so we've had four reschedulings of this

bone marrow transplant. Oh, wow. The one that you're, the one that you're currently isolated for. Yeah. But with each of those reschedulings, I had to ask myself, can I trust you through this? Can I believe that you're in control, that you are far wiser than I ever could be? Can I trust you through the pain? I trust you through becoming a pincush in the hospital? Can I trust you when this whole thing transitioned to AML and the risks became even higher? Is he still walking with me? Is he still taking care of me? And the answer is yes.

Oh. And so people can read the book and they can get the inspiration from it and all that good stuff. And I hope your bone marrow transport goes, what do you, sketched for that? Hopefully we go into the hospital one month from today for what they call conditioning, which is heavy chemo that pretty much kills off everything. Jesus. And then the transplant is almost anticlimactic because it's like a big blood transfusion. Yeah. So they give you the transfusion. They have to watch you really closely because you don't have any antibodies and the risk for infections high. Oh, wow. And it takes about two weeks usually for the, for the grass.

craft to take and the new bone marrow, the new stem cells to start producing healthy blood cells. It's amazing what they can do with science these days. In the book, you have the phrase, with all your heart. What does that mean to you personally? It means wholly without limit to not do something partially, but to do it wholly and not limit myself. And again, as I mentioned earlier, to not take my mind. my worries back, know that those worries, those anxieties are best placed at the feet of the throne of God. Now, have your roles as a pastor's wife, parent, grandparent, nurse, educator, and mentor shaped the way you wrote this book?

I think so. Being a parent, we tried to instill in our children the importance of trusting God. and worked one of our children is straightaway, but the other two are pretty solid Christ followers. Probably the biggest thing is that at Cal Baptist, it is a private Christian institution, and we are asked to integrate our faith into our teaching. So if I'm teaching nursing, then I need to show my students how my...

My faith as an example and their faith makes a difference in the care that they provide for patients. And I've watched those students. I've watched them graduate. I've watched them work as RNs. And many of them reflect that type of mentality as not just me. It's the whole faculty sharing their faith and letting students know that even when life happens. And life happens with the students that we are there to encourage them, to build them up, and to help them to become the best Christ followers and the best nurses they can be.

That's important. And what a great thing to utilize to flip people. What would you say to someone who wants to trust God, but they feel disappointed, afraid, overwhelmed? They feel maybe they're slighted by God, and so they're not too happy with the boy. It does happen. And I would say that how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. And so it's not something that can change overnight.

But what I would say is it's usually not God who's let them down. It's people. Because we are all sinners. And as Christians, we blow it all the time. And that maybe what they need to do first is turn to God. and just say, hey, I'm struggling. Can you help me with this, God? And it may take a lot of time, and I talk about that in the book as well. Yeah. It's a struggle. When you can, we can, no one, there's an old saying, I think Dennis Miller wrote this in his comedy, but no one finds Christ

on prom night. It's only after you've pissed off everybody in the world and usually end up in prison that suddenly you decide you want to find God. When things are taught, when things are good, when everything's going well, you're like, yeah, yeah, God's cool, he's all right. But when you hit on trouble times, I think that's when you find, that's when you find the challenge to your faith, right? That's true.

But you need to continue to trust when the times are good as well. Yeah, yeah, that's really important. One of the things I mentioned in the book, and I interviewed the director of worship at CDU, and she talked about how important it was to worship, because when we present our body as a living sacrifice to God, that is worship. And that is a way of surrendering ourselves to God. And then I tie it back.

And this morning I was praying the verses in Philippians 4, 6 through 7, that what God wants us to do as part of our worship is to be anxious for nothing. that we need to take those anxieties and give them to God. And when we do, that he gives us that peace that we can't understand. And that's what I've been praying for myself, because this week I've been struggling with anxiety. Yeah. And praying that verse really helped.

Yeah. And you're going to be fine. These doctors, they got stuff they do now. I had two hernia surgeries last year, and it's not as complicated as what you're going to do. But, boy, they did all sorts of stuff to me, and they blew me up like a big ball and put in these robot arms inside me and fixed my hernius. And it's pretty crazy. And I just woke up and they're like, you're fixed.

And I was like, cool. That was wild. Whatever happened. Whatever you did. And where's my wallet? But that's health care these days. But no, I think you're going to be good. And I believe the bone marrow can help you overcome leukemia.

Is that correct? It should cure all three forms. Oh, really? And you said you had ALS, ALS2? I have chronic lymphocytic leukemia or CLL, myelodysplastic syndrome, MDS, and then MDS transformed to acute myelocytic leukemia, which is AML, which you can see in children as well as adults. Really? Wow. Hopefully they swing it all and knock it all out of the park,

that I mean, they may come back for another try. but Chris Vosho in our audience, I'm sure will be behind you thinking of you and wishing the best for you. How did you find the book, Malitz, biblical teaching with personal reflection and real life application? I put Bible verses that were relevant to each thing. Like, for example, with faith, Abraham, going up a hill and knowing that God had asked him to sacrifice his son and knowing that God would provide. Joseph saying at the end of everything to his brothers, you meant this for evil, but God meant it for good. And maybe cancer.

Maybe it was meant for evil, but God meant it for good if we glorify him in it. You've got people like even Mary, she was given this calling to give birth to the son of God. And she said, do as you will with me, oh God. Paul who struggled with first of all he was the the biggest enemy of Christ followers and then he became the greatest proponent and he was stoned and he was shipwrecked and a whole lot of other things and yet in the middle of all of that he continued to trust in God when he got stoned it probably wasn't quite as bad oh wait you're talking about the different kind of stoning sorry yeah I had to get that joke in there that's what we do on the show we throw a little bit of entertainment. But yeah, it's probably not the not fun stoning part. That's so. The stories are great and they've been around for a yons of time because they help people through life. I believe, do you journal, I think, playing reflective questions, scripture passages.

How does that play into the reader's experience when they read your book? Each chapter has journal questions and there's actually a page that they can write in the book itself. And my suggestion is that they take these books one chapter at a time and really, really delve into the material. Look at the key scriptures. And there's a lot of scriptures embedded in along with the examples that I mentioned. And there's also, throughout the book, there's like little blurbs that kind of talk about the theme behind the chapter. For example, trust isn't a peripheral virtue. It's the architecture beneath how we live.

And that's in, I think, the first chapter. And there's those throughout. And then the questions, there are questions at the end, an invitation to the heart, growing in trust, wisdom and discernment. So there's reflection questions, journal prompts. And then there's also in each of the chapters of prayer of surrender that, relates itself back to the chapter that they had just read. Then there's a page in each chapter where they can write down what they've learned. So it's a great thing where they can really think about, they can ponder, they can reflect.

These are all great things at being able to think about our life. We need to take time out to think about these things, right? Because otherwise we're just going 100 miles an hour through life and we're on autopilot. And we need to take time. Your journaling is great for that, taking time to think about what life is. What are plans made for the future and all that good stuff? Would you agree? I totally agree.

What's one lesson that you have in the book that you find yourself returning to again and again, maybe the strongest or your favorite one that you like the most? I think it's leaning into God. And I think the reason for that is it's really easy to pull away and try to do it yourself. And I've done that multiple times in my life and have always fallen flat on my face. Oh, boy. But when I lean into God and say, okay, God, I don't understand this. I really, I don't like this.

This is the way I planned it. But I know that you're God, that you're faithful, that you're strong, and that I can trust you. and that your ways are so much more powerful than my ways. Thoughts are so much better than my thoughts. And your plans are so much better than my plans. And I'm throwing Bible verses together here. It's important that people have faith. Hope is the great thing that is the enduring shining star, I think, that really is human

beings' greatest facet, their ability to hope, their ability to believe in the future, their ability to embrace change and to keep going. We can't give up. You got to keep moving and all that good stuff. And if readers... That hope is going to be my next book. I think that would be a great title. Yeah.

Hope. It's the one thing that makes me still put up with humans. The more I get to know humans, the more I love my dogs. But the one thing that... For us is cats. Yeah. And humans do all sorts of bad, evil, rotten things. and like you mentioned, sinners is not perfect, but it's, it's, we always have to hope, no matter how bad things get.

You see people, they lose their homes, they lose their family and friends, and they go, what are you going to do? And I'm going to rebuild. You're like, you're going to rebuild after the tornado, wiped everything you own off the face of the earth. And they're like, yeah, and it's just one of our most enduring things. If the readers remember only one message from with your heart, your book, with all your heart, your book title, What do you hope it will be? I think it's that God is worthy of our trust, that people may fall short, but God is worthy of our trust, not because life is easy, because it isn't, not because the circumstances are going to change when we trust him, but because he's faithful and because he always comes through. Not always when we want it, but he always comes through.

And we don't understand every turn in the road. We really don't. But we can trust that God is walking alongside us in the midst of the difficult times, as well as in the midst of the easier times, and that he's still directing and guiding our path. It's a wonderful message of hope, inspiration, faith, and trust in learning to believe. Sometimes in the moments when it's not all fun in games, right? It's not all belief and easygoing and stuff. No one finds Christ and Promeny in the back seat of the pickup truck or the car or whatever.

But, you know, when everything's great, we don't really think about these things, but when everything kind of hits the fan, then we start going, maybe I need to address some things here. And so your book is a great inspiration, I'm sure, to take and achieve that. So as we go out, give people a final pitch out, Marion, on getting your book picked up and reading it and all that good stuff. So this is the book. Can you see it?

Yeah. Beautiful cover. And the cover was actually done by my daughter-in-law. Oh. It was 20 years out, not doing art. We were talking about things last fall. And I asked her to create something that kind of reflected this book. And this is what she paints.

Oh, wow. But the book will, it is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. and then books for life, they are going to be providing us with an audio book. Yeah. And I want to give a shout out to Anna Jones. She has just been phenomenal in supporting me as we approach the release date of the book, which is June 30th. But you can pre-order them before that. Folks, pre-read the book and take advantage of that and all the stuff you're doing there.

Yeah, people love those audiobooks. Those are really popular. In fact, I have 5 million books. on Audible. And I think I've listened to 50 of them. I need to work on that. You have to keep buying more because you have credits. And you're like, I got to use this credits.

You're like, oh, there's a great book. I'm going to read that. And then it's kind of, I think there's an old joke about how books, people buy books, and then they never read them, but they put them on their shelf. And they just think that by buying them and assimilating close to them that maybe they assimilate the knowledge, they soak it up, maybe. I think we're all guilty of that. Yeah, we're all guilty of that.

I do that with records sometimes music. I bought that album. I never listened to it. What was going on there? Like that ever happened. Thank you very much, Marion, for coming on. Give us your dot coms one last time or any place you want people to find you on the end webs. So the website is Miriamdunkerly.com.

And it's a work in progress, but it should be open this evening. And we're still building it. My son is, my oldest son is actually a web designer. Awesome. That's good they have. I have a presence on Facebook. That's Marian Dunkerly books. I have a presence on Instagram as well.

And that's just Marian Dunkerly with no space between the first and last name. Ah, thank you very much for coming the show. We really appreciate Mary. It's been delightful to have you, and you've done such a wonderful job. Thank you. Thank you. And thanks for my honest for tuning in. Pick up her book where refined books are sold.

It is called With All Your Heart, Trusting God through every season. And they'll be linked for it in the Chris Foss show. Thanks for tuning in. Go to Goodreads.com, Fortresschus Christchristch, Christvost, LinkedIn. com, Fortress, Chris Foss, 1 on the TikTok, and you know, all those crazy places on the internet. Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you next.

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