Sharon Hawkins wants others to know that she is totally in love with Jesus. Through hardships, trials and blessings, she has learned that there is no end to His mercy, His grace and His faithfulness. There’s simply no better friend than Jesus. In 2008, she answered God’s calling to begin a Ministry called Grace in The Wilderness. She loves to encourage other people, and, through the Ministry’s blogs, support group meetings, conferences and her new podcast, Finding Grace In The Wilderness, she and others are challenging women and teens to discover Christ in a new and deeper way, She speaks at youth and women gatherings. The Grace In The Wilderness Team is pointing women and teens to find who they are in Him and His plan for their lives.
She was a business owner for twenty-three years before starting a home business and focusing more on ministry. In addition to leading Grace In The Wilderness, she is also the Women’s Ministry Director of a Church in Pickens, SC. Added to the mix of her busy life are her precious grandchildren, Levi and Hadley, who have brought her more joy than she can begin to put into words.
Her heart and her calling are for women. When starting Grace In The Wilderness, never did she imagine all the wilderness situations that God would introduce her to in equipping her to minister to women.
As a business woman, she faced embezzlements by two trusted employees. In 2010, she learned about forgiveness at a new level with the betrayal of a close friend who embezzled over 1/2 a million dollars from her business and was sent to federal prison.
Sharon has experienced God’s incredible grace through adversity during breast cancer and melanoma diagnoses and multiple surgeries that have perpetuated a continuing daily painful nerve illness. Both cancers were stage 1 and she has now been cancer free for 13 years. Praise God! Her cancer journey is chronicled at www.caringbridge.org/visit/sharonhawkins.
She cared for her parents through cancer and Parkinson’s, and was with each of them when they met Jesus–experiences she would trade for anything. Her mom passed in 2008 from breast and colon cancer; and her dad passed in 2016 after Parkinson’s finally took his swallowing. Such suffering, yet such victory as they are both now safe in the arms of Jesus and waiting for Sharon.
Then on November 10, 2021, her worst fear in life became a reality. Her 21-year-old son, Bradley, left this earth to meet Jesus when he fell from a skateboard and died on the way to the hospital from cardiac arrest. Gone too soon, he took a very big piece of Sharon’s heart with him. Now she finds herself carrying on the legacy of her young son as she speaks of his life story–how God made an orphan boy a brother to Jesus. She is involved in fundraising for Fair Play Boys Camp and promotes the Bradley Hawkins Scholarship Fund for underprivileged Boyscouts to go to summer camp at Camp Old Indian. These are both missions close to Bradley’s heart. There are two deaths, Sharon says, “One when you die, and one when no one says your name any more.” She is determined that Bradley’s name is never forgotten, and she is longing for that next bear hug from him at Heaven’s gate one fine day.
Joy and grief are both rooted in love and she is experiencing both through Jesus these days. She lives to comfort others with the amazing comfort that God has given her. With God’s amazing provision and the support of her wonderful friends and family—husband, Scott, and son, Taylor, and daughter-in-law, Reid, Sharon is, not only surviving her wilderness one day at a time, but finding that His grace is more than sufficient no matter what.