The Walk Family Podcast
The Walk Family Podcast is a show focused on biblical parenting (what the Bible says about parenting) and reaches all stages of life. Whether you are a new or experienced parent, we all make mistakes and wrestle through what being a godly mom or dad looks like in daily life. This podcast provides hope and encouragement through the Bible's teaching about being the parent God desires you to be.
The Walk Family Podcast
Christine Handy: From Despair to Hope - A Journey of Faith, Community, and Transformation
Hope and resilience shine through as Christine shares her harrowing experience with breast cancer, revealing how despair can lead to unexpected growth and purpose. Her story emphasizes the importance of community support and faith in overcoming life's greatest challenges.
• Christine recounts her modeling career and personal insecurities
• Contemplation of suicide shortly after diagnosis
• Shift from external to internal faith during illness
• The invaluable role of community support throughout her journey
• Importance of vulnerability and accepting help from others
• Transformation into a mentor for others battling illness
• The power of storytelling and a hopeful message in the upcoming film
Walk Beside Me: A Novel
You can connect with Tony and Laura at
thewalkpodcastministries@gmail.com
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https://www.thewalkfm.com/
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Hey everybody, it's Tony and welcome back to the Walk Family Podcast. I am bringing you a series titled Seasons of Despair, which focuses on different experiences of life, such as marriage, raising kids and loss of loved ones, and how people navigate those hardships. Laura and I bring to the table conversations from our own home, as well as introduce some guests sharing their stories. Everybody goes through trials and tribulations in life. Sometimes it feels we can't ever escape the pain that that brings. James 1, 2, and 3 says Consider it pure joy. My brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, this is easier said than done. Despair, by definition, is the loss or absence of hope. As a believer in Jesus, there is always that eternal hope we have, but sometimes we don't always feel like it exists. It's an incredibly challenging thing when we feel despair in this life, when we think there is no hope and all we experience is hurt and pain. My hope and my prayer is that this series will show that you are not alone in your moments of despair.
Speaker 2:I went to one of my friends and I said listen, I have had enough and I don't know how to move forward. I am going to take my life, and I'm telling you this not for you to feel sorry for me, but I just don't want you to think, oh, what I could have done. And she looked at me and she said that's a generational burden. This is generational. That you're going to change your children's life, your grandchildren's life, their children's life, because that's what happens with suicide.
Speaker 2:And I had never really thought about that and it's a very selfish act. That's what she told me and I was like it doesn't feel very selfish, it feels like I'm giving right, I'm taking myself out of this equation so that you guys don't have to suffer, so that my children don't have to suffer. And she was like you're taking the gift of us participating in this season of your life, and it is a gift. And I thought, wow, if she really believes this, then I really have a distorted mind and I have to come to a place where I can believe that too.
Speaker 1:As I was talking with Christine, all I could think about was the word wow. The amount of resilience and endurance that she had in order to get through this journey, not just this cancer journey, but with all of the ups and downs, with relationships and family. This is truly from the Lord and, thinking about my own life, the trials are so minimal in comparison and I know that when you guys listen to this episode, it's going to be powerful, you're going to be impacted and it's just a profound story. If you're interested in learning more about Christine, you can just look her up on Google and you can connect with her in any which way. She does have a book out called Walk Beside Me, which there's a link that you can get access to that book in the show notes.
Speaker 1:That book is also being turned into a film, which comes out sometime in early 2025. But the film is titled Hello Beautiful, so the trailer should be coming out at any point after the new year, which, by the time that you're listening to this, was a week ago. And, yeah, sometime in early 2025, you're going to be, you're going to be able to watch this film, and I was fortunate enough to get a sneak peek of this film and it is just it is mind blowing incredibly powerful. So enough of me talking. Here is Christine telling everybody her story. Yeah, so let's just kind of start off with you know a little bit about yourself, kind of your origin, where you come from, your family, all of it.
Speaker 2:So my name is Christine Handy. I am originally from St Louis, missouri. I'm a Midwestern girl. I currently live in Miami, florida, so I jumped onto the East Coast. My family is still, most of them, in St Louis. I come from a large family of them in St Louis. I come from a large family. My father has 10 brothers and sisters and I'm one of four girls, so we have big gatherings at the holidays. But that's where I grew up and then I went to SMU for my undergrad education, which was in Dallas, and I ended up living there for about 25 years and then I moved to Miami in 2015.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. Tell me a little bit about you. Were in St Louis, decided to go to SMU. What did you pursue for college?
Speaker 2:So I was in St Louis. I started modeling when I was at the age of 11, and St Louis was a small modeling market, and so part of the reason why I chose to go to SMU was Dallas was a bigger market for modeling. So, although I did get a college education, I was very much focused on my modeling career and after I finished college I went over to Barcelona and worked for Elite Worldwide as one of their models. So I would say I used my education just because, of course, we always use our brain and learning is one of our greatest resources, but I really was a full-time model, including up until today. I still do model.
Speaker 1:That's so cool, like it's just, it's something that you started, you know, in your early years and now you know years, decades later. It's like decades later.
Speaker 2:Decades later. Well, I'm doing it differently now. I'm doing it to help people, because I model in Miami Swim Week without a chest because of my breast cancer debacle. Then it helps people realize. You know what Her beauty is inside. It comes from something different than external, which is, of course, what everybody thinks of as the modeling industry. It's all external. Well, most of it is, but not when I'm on the runway.
Speaker 1:And I really want to talk about your story with breast cancer. But right before that, how was life leading up to it? Because I think you were in your early 40s.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:It hit. You were probably well into your modeling career, Like what was life like before breast cancer happened.
Speaker 2:You know, I think a lot of people are attracted to my story because, I'm very honest, my life up until breast cancer was a bit I was very insecure. So you imagine a 23-year-old who is at the height of her modeling career and you think that girl has some self-esteem, she is strong in assuredness, right? Well, I think that myself and most of the girls I worked with really struggled with self-esteem. So, leading up to my breast cancer diagnosis, I feel like I felt like something was missing. It definitely wasn't illness, but I was searching for something in my life, searching for purpose, searching for something that was different than my family, searching for something that was different than my family, different than my children, different than my husband, different than my career. There was something that I wasn't. I couldn't put my finger on it, and so I prayed a lot and I said to God I said, please give me whatever it is that I'm missing. And all of a sudden I was diagnosed with breast cancer and that was a complete shift for me.
Speaker 1:I'm really intrigued about your book. But in the story the main character, which pretty much represents you, has a name change and the name is Willow. Why the name change?
Speaker 2:Well, willow has always been a nickname of mine, ever since I was a child, and so I did change all the names in the book and I did change the cities, because if you read the whole book, it is very vulnerable and it is very honest and there's a lot of things that aren't very flattering about myself or my family, and I just wanted to kind of give a little bit of a buffer between you know, putting something like that out into the world, to the masses and to now, really millions of people, because my book's been made into a film which is coming out in 2025. And so that's going to be millions of people now hearing my story, and I just felt like it was the right thing to do for my children. So that's why I did that.
Speaker 1:Did family members kind of catch on, like with the name change and recognize that this was your story and kind of put pieces together? Or did that buffer kind of do its job?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think it did its job. I think that there were some people in my life that were very upset about the vulnerability and the honesty that I wrote. But I felt, you know, listen everybody. There were some people who, like my publisher, my original publisher, who said you know, you should really leave out the God part because that's going to alienate some people. And I said, well, that's not authentic to my story. The God part's part of my story, and so there's always something that's there's a lot of things that people aren't going to like and there's a lot of those very things some people are going to like. So it's like you can't please everybody and I'm not looking to, I'm just trying to give an honest portrayal of what happened to me and how I survived it, in an effort to give people hope and to give people tools to survive similar trauma or any trauma really.
Speaker 1:Mm-hmm, yeah, the aspect of having a faith in God, not just prior but through and even like after this journey. It's just like it's remarkable to see how he moves and I'd like to talk about that here in just a second and then just how that shapes who you are as a person. And in the story, Willow contemplates suicide right after the diagnosis, like almost immediately after. And my question is why, Like you hadn't experienced chemo, you hadn't gone through the treatments?
Speaker 2:Why so quickly?
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's almost as though you contemplate suicide right after the diagnosis, literally, yeah. I'm just curious why.
Speaker 2:You know, I felt okay. So that was my third major illness. I had a colon resection when I was 35. I had a really major problem with my right arm when I was 41. And I was really bullied by a doctor and I had no faith in the medical community. I had very little faith in anything. Everything that I felt like was solid ground was rumbling underneath me. I felt like I was orphaned. I felt like I had no family history of breast cancer, so it came out of nowhere. I felt like I was sideswiped in every direction. My marriage was becoming almost unbearable and my arm was now fully fused my right arm and I felt like for years my friends and family had already taken care of me, and so I felt ashamed to ask for more help, and I knew that if I didn't have help I would never survive the chemo I was about to go through, and so I really did.
Speaker 2:You know, your brain becomes very distorted in times like that of complete duress and because I was coming off like six or seven surgeries for my arm. So I had a lot of anesthesia, a lot of pain medication, a lot of antibiotics, a lot of things that were making my brain not clear and I felt like if I did that, I was helping my family and my friends. Again, that is a distorted, distorted brain. That is not a clear brain. Looking back, I think how sad to be in that kind of catastrophe of emotion and feel so much despair and feel like, in order to help the people that I love, I had to take myself out of this world. That's a horrible place to be, but because I was so desperate to get out of my life and to help the people that were caring for me for years, that distorted my decision making and I really plotted my suicide and it was. It's a funny it's not funny ha-ha, but it's a funny, interesting story how God shifted that.
Speaker 2:Because my son was in boarding school and I had plotted the day I was gonna take my life and he had gotten in trouble at boarding school so he was not allowed to come home. He was a flight away, it wasn't close, and so okay, I said okay, well, I'm just going to and, of course and this is all in my head I'm just going to postpone it a week until I can say goodbye to my son. I wasn't going to tell my son I was going to take my life and he got postponed again. He got in trouble at school again, so for three weekends he couldn't come home. So by the time he came home my friends had convinced me that not only would they never forsake me, that God would never forsake me, but God needed to stop my son from coming home in order to stop me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and at the time you probably didn't think too much of it, but in hindsight I had no idea.
Speaker 2:I just was like inconvenienced. I was like, oh gosh, I have to actually get this port in my chest because I haven't taken my life yet. I mean, again, it's such a distorted mind and I think trauma, and continued trauma, can really distort your thoughts, and also fear, right. I mean, if you're focused on fear which of course I was, that's all, like I was consumed by fear Then the distortion starts to really sink in, and and when I, when I ultimately became focused on hope and faith, that distortion never came back.
Speaker 1:The thought of having such a low point and distorting all of those thoughts to cause you to even contemplate and plan out right. Taking your own life, Would you say that was truly your lowest point, or did it get lower once you started the treatment?
Speaker 2:No, I would say that was my lowest point. I never wanted to take my life after that. I had some very dark moments after that. That wasn't like clear sailing ahead. But and then there's one part in the book where I literally go underneath a table and my and I was so violently ill from chemo and a friend of mine walks in and she can't find me anywhere in my house and she ultimately finds me under the table under a blanket and I am just a wreck. I'm very emotional and crying and and I would say that's also a dark moment. But I didn't contemplate suicide at that moment. I just was like, please hide me. I wanted something to shield me from all the pain and all the all the emotional but also of the physical pain. The chemo was really violent in my body and that actually scene that scene is in the movie and when they were filming that scene last January I couldn't go to set that day. I was like, okay, I'm going to stay away today because this was a very emotional scene for me.
Speaker 1:When we first talked, you had mentioned experiencing some insecurity. Did you experience insecurity going through all of your treatment?
Speaker 2:You know, at that point I don't think I really was that insecure because I had kind of shred my ego at that point. You know, I'd gotten to nothing. I found myself at the lowest point of my life and I was rebuilding, but I wasn't rebuilding on insecurity, I was rebuilding on faith, and when you rebuild on faith, your insecurities ultimately wash away. Of course, I had 20 friends who would show up for me and say, like I said before, they were never going to forsake me because God was never going to forsake me. Well then, I would focus on that. Well, what does that mean? And I would ask them questions what do you mean? God's never going to forsake me?
Speaker 2:Well then they introduced me to certain Bible scriptures and podcasts and books and faith-based books, and so I was immersing myself in the moments that I could.
Speaker 2:Right, I'm still going through chemo and I'm in the chemo chair every week and, like I said, it was very violent. And so there were many moments where I couldn't focus on anything other than I just was trying not to throw up. And on the moments that I could focus on it, I was asking a lot of questions and I was diving into faith. I wasn't sitting around watching soap operas. I was sitting around watching YouTube channels of Stephen Furtick and Bishop Jakes and all these amazing preachers that really bring faith to such a basic level where people like myself could understand it. Now, not everybody gets that opportunity to focus on faith Like I. Didn't have to work during that time, which was a blessing, and I also had faith-based friends, which was also set up, I believe, prior to that whole thing happening, because they were the ones that were pouring into my mind and what you believe you become, so that insecurity slowly washed away, not only because my thoughts were washing away of that insecurity, but they were refilling it with thoughts of hope.
Speaker 1:Yeah, your team of angels is what?
Speaker 2:I've read.
Speaker 1:I want to talk about them in just a moment. Right, I've read I want to talk about them in just a moment, but going through the countless, I think I saw was it 28 chemo treatments over the course of I think it was over a year 15 months 15 months. Every week physically exhausting. This is emotionally draining. How did you see your spirituality or your faith change through those 15 months?
Speaker 2:Well, you know, it's interesting because I'm a mother and during that time my 13 and 11 year old children were. I was not able to care for them. I was hardly able to care for myself, and so that could lead to more insecurity. Because that's my job, I can't even, and those are human beings, those are my responsibility, and if I can't take care of them I would feel guilty about that. But my friends would also say to me no, that we are the hands and the feet of Lord, we'll cover them. So they were covering my family, they were covering me. So my faith was building. My faith was I've always been, I've grown up Catholic, but my faith was shifting from a basically an external relationship with God to an internal relationship with God.
Speaker 2:I feel like prior to my diagnosis, everything was externally based. You know my physical appearance, my dependency on that, my dependency on materialism, my dependency on relationships of this world it's all very external. Well, when you put yourself in a position like that where all of that can be taken away we all know resources can be taken away. Relationally, things can be taken away your beauty, you age right, illness takes beauty away. Well, when all those things can be taken away and you find yourself in that position. You have to really figure out what you're going to focus on, and for me, I had nothing left. My ego was gone, my pride was gone. I had to focus on something that was life-giving, and that was the only thing that I could figure out. That was the only life giving thing that I knew after everything else was taken, where you truly have nothing left.
Speaker 2:And.
Speaker 1:God just takes over, faith takes over, and it's just a remarkable thing to hear about as far as a story, but it's also remarkable for me. I'm talking to somebody who's gone through something like that, and so I want to talk about your team of angels for a second, and kind of how significant they were, because they were a huge piece to your journey.
Speaker 2:So they were a significant part of my. First of all, they kept me alive. They my.
Speaker 2:I went to one of my friends and I said, listen, I I have had enough and I don't know how to move forward. I am going to take my life, and I'm telling you this not for you to feel sorry for me, but I just don't want you to think, oh, what I could have done. And she looked at me and she said that's a generational burden. This is generational. That you're going to change your children's life, your grandchildren's life, their children's life, because that's what happens with suicide. And I had never really thought about that and it's a very selfish act. That's what she told me, and I had never really thought about that. And it's a very selfish act. That's what she told me. And I was like it doesn't feel very selfish. It feels like I'm giving right, I'm taking myself out of this equation so that you guys don't have to suffer, so that my children don't have to suffer. And she was like you're taking the gift of us participating in this season of your life, and it is a gift. And I thought, wow, if she really believes this, then I really have a distorted mind and I have to come to a place where I can believe that too.
Speaker 2:Well, ultimately I did, which is why I serve now, because after I became healthy, it was now my responsibility to share what they had taught me. So, just the first month, they got me to save my life, right? Well then, for the 14 plus months that continued, they fed me, they held my hand, they rubbed my back, they took me to chemo, they drove me because I had a cast on my right arm and I couldn't drive. They took care of my family, they traveled with me. When I went to New York because I had to see my arm surgeon, they filled in the gap. Every single day there was somebody at my house. Every day. They had floaters that if one of the girls couldn't come on a Monday, tuesday, Wednesday, thursday or Friday, they had floaters that would come.
Speaker 2:I've never seen anything like it and, to be honest with you, when I was going through it and I was seeing all this almost from a marginalized perspective right, you're kind of watching it outside of yourself I realized that God had a big project for me. There was no way that the people in the community that saw somebody at my house every day, that were wondering, also being inspired by this devotion. They didn't even know me and afterwards would come up to me and say gosh, I just knew something special was going on in your life, even at this dark moment, and I would be able to preach to them. And so I knew that God had a big plan for me and it was my responsibility to share the story of these angels. They were the ones that interceded.
Speaker 2:Right, they were the hands and the feet of the Lord, quite literally. But my problem was and this is being very honest I almost gave them too much credit instead of giving the credit to God. So after my completion of the chemo, it was like, oh, these women saved my life. No, god saved my life and he used these women to do it, and it took me several years to figure that part of it out. But the glory is to God, not to them. But they were the hands and the feet.
Speaker 1:As far as a team, how many, roughly, would you say?
Speaker 2:30.
Speaker 1:30. You had 30 people being used by God to help you navigate 15 months of chemo and all of that.
Speaker 2:But probably more than 30, because even the police department that was in the town that I lived in they would bring cookies to me, they would come over and they would sit with my friends and so they were being ministered to right. So it was probably more than that, but on a week-to-week basis it was probably 30 women.
Speaker 1:Obviously you felt the Lord working through these women. How did it affect your family? I know it's kind of a loaded question Not so much the treatment and the diagnosis and all of that, but how did the support change or impact your family?
Speaker 2:Well, my parents lived away and for them they could rely on my friends to update them, so for them it was really comforting, I think. For my now ex-husband, I think it was difficult for him because one he didn't marry a sick woman and I became very sick many times. A sick woman and I became very sick many times. And I think he my friends often said, you know, I think he's a little jealous of the attention.
Speaker 2:I don't know that to be a fact, but I also know that it would be hard for a man to have all these people in his home all the time caring for his wife. Now he couldn't have cared for me like they did, there's no way. He had a job. He went and visited our son who was at boarding school. He did everything that he could, um, but he couldn't be everywhere for everybody, including me, and so I'm sure he was very grateful. But he also had a lot of people all of a sudden in his life for months and months and months, and they were constant, and I'm sure that was hard for him.
Speaker 1:How did it affect your kids?
Speaker 2:So you know they were boys, they are boys and boys, especially at that age, have a difficult time emoting their feelings. They often can't label right, so fear translates into anger. So they really did push me away a lot because they were afraid, and if mom's going to be this sick and I'm afraid she's going to die, well, maybe I'll push her away so that I don't feel so bad when she does. Because there were a few months I mean there were moments in that journey where I'm sure everybody thought I was going to die, including myself, not from taking my life, but from the chemotherapy, and so they were very self-protective, which is a very human emotion, and so they did. They pushed me away for a very long time.
Speaker 1:Your relationships with your family kind of hit a low point as well. Your kids were kind of distancing themselves and it sounds like you had some struggles with, like your marriage and it sounds like you had some struggles with, like your marriage. How did that kind of compound the fact that you're ill and potentially like deathly? So You're going through all of these treatments and now, like was there ever a feeling of abandonment from even like your own family?
Speaker 2:I think that I felt in many ways like I was orphaned during the beginning of that process, and I don't mean orphaned by necessarily anybody in my family. I felt very alone, maybe, like you know, orphaned in a sense of spirituality, like I was out there on my own and kind of flailing. And so you know, I know that none of that was intentional from them, of course not. They were not intending to hurt me, but they're also boys and my husband's obviously a man, so it was like the three of them and it was me. And so in fact I had a long discussion with the director about when we were filming the movie. He said we have to show loneliness on a film in a screen without saying, oh, the protagonist is lonely. And so they figured out ways to do that, because loneliness is part of illness, ways to do that because loneliness is part of illness.
Speaker 2:It's very difficult for anybody who doesn't know that feeling of being diagnosed with cancer to explain it, for anybody to understand it that hasn't gone through it. And so I felt very alone in that journey and I also didn't have any contemporaries. I was young, I was 41 at the time. The only person I knew that had breast cancer was my mother's best friend who died, and so I think that, inherently, when we are diagnosed with a disease, we tend to feel very isolated and alone, unless we already have that foundational faith that we never feel alone. Right, I hadn't gotten there yet.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that was actually my follow-up question Like had you hit a point where you even felt if God had forsaken you or left you? I know like in words, right, you said that your, your, your friends had said God's never going to forsake you. But sometimes what you're feeling or what you're experiencing is the opposite. It's like, oh sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah, forsake you, but sometimes what you're feeling or what you're experiencing is the opposite.
Speaker 2:It's like, oh sure, so I didn't know if you'd ever hit that. Oh, of course, yeah, I was very. I don't remember having that type of conversation with God. I do remember saying why are you taking everything away from me? Why are you taking everything that I thought to be secure in my life is now being taken away? Why? I didn't understand it and, but you know, I needed to be. First of all, I needed my wings to be clipped. That was one Second of all.
Speaker 2:I needed to rebuild my life, and the only way that I I you know I I'm putting this into my own perception the only way that I was going to rebuild my life was to have all of those things taken away. If I had a few of them taken away, I probably would have seeped back into that life of materialism or that life of false idols that a lot of us have, and I needed all of it to be gone in order to have a clear canvas and to be rebuilt. On everything, my focus was faith, Everything. It had to be that way for me, and maybe it was because I'm stubborn, or maybe it was because I had been living with false idols for too long, I don't know, or maybe because the story needed to be bigger. I don't know, but that's what had to happen with me Because the story needed to be bigger.
Speaker 1:I don't know, but that's what had to happen with me. You had hinted at a faith element in your life before your diagnosis and obviously there's a huge piece of that during and after. I'm curious how did that metaphor for us kind of transform? What was your faith like before and how has it changed to now, naturally assuming it's probably stronger?
Speaker 2:but maybe in what ways? Oh yeah, I mean, it's so different, it's almost like 180 degrees. I knew God, I prayed, I went to church when my parents made me. I went a couple times in college when my parents weren't around. I didn't read the Bible.
Speaker 2:I put my kids in a Christian school and I put them in camps that were Christian-based, but I wasn't walking the walk at all. My friends would invite me to Bible studies and I was too busy going to yoga classes focusing on my body. I had no time for a Bible study and my friends were like, okay, and there had to be an end to that. Right, there was like a coming of some sort of clash, because that wasn't the right way to live. That wasn't walking the walk, and so it made sense. When everything came to a head, I was like, gosh, darn it. I should have been going to those Bible studies and not going to yoga.
Speaker 2:But yoga was a false idol for me, and so, again, I think that now my children see me as a servant. My children see me as a hope facilitator. My children see me pouring out faith. My children see me dependent on my faith. My children see me pouring out faith. My children see me dependent on my faith. My children see me not materialistic anymore and I'm trying to reteach them because I made a mistake, I taught them wrong, and so there's a lot of lessons in this and, yeah, I think it's a total shift and I'm so grateful because, like I said, my faith is not external anymore, it's internal. I have this beautiful relationship with Jesus. I talk to Jesus nonstop, nonstop. It's my foothold.
Speaker 1:So you've experienced this victory over cancer, You've experienced this renewed more internal, powerful relationship with Jesus.
Speaker 2:What is life like now? Every day I get to wake up and give people hope. I mean, I'm so excited about the movie because it's a bigger platform to give people hope. You know, I think historically Hollywood has portrayed illness movies. Hollywood has portrayed illness movies, cancer movies, lots of illness that have ended in a funeral, and I always I believe that when people are diagnosed with something or they go through something that they seek out whether it's a book, whether it's TV series, whether it's a movie, media they seek that out because they want to hear other stories about what they're about to go through. And so many times I would seek out movies about breast cancer or cancer in general, and the outcome was fear-based and the outcome was not surviving. And I always believe that if I could get my book made into a movie, I could shift that and if God wanted it to be out there, it could change a lot of lives. And so people, when they were going through the journey, or caretakers or family members, they could see this film and be like, okay, you know what? This has a happier ending, this has a more hopeful ending, and so it's my job to keep working on getting that film out. That's one.
Speaker 2:I mentor a lot of cancer patients. I do a lot of interviews. I obviously have a big social media following which I put a lot of content out there about hope, about faith, and so every day I get to wake up and give people hope and I get to show off my faith I guess is the right way to say it. I get to be very vulnerable about my story, which takes a lot of courage, but I think that my courage comes from God and on the days that I have very little courage, I borrow it from other people, and on the days when I have a ton of courage, I lend it out to other people, and so he always shows up and I'm very grateful, for that Doesn't mean I don't have dark moments.
Speaker 2:Now I have friends and kids that I mentor, literally young women that I mentor who have died of breast cancer, and those days are not easy for me and it's not about me, but I get back in there and I try to help more and more people every day. Every day I wake up, I say, okay, god, lead me in the direction you want me to go, and to the that need to hear my story and at night I said okay, do I? Did I impact enough people today? And, if not, show me tomorrow where I was missing? And so that's what I, that's what I do.
Speaker 1:The film that is coming out.
Speaker 2:You said 2025, like coming out soon very soon.
Speaker 1:Um, I did a little bit of research and it appears to have a different title than your book.
Speaker 2:It does.
Speaker 1:So I don't know if you had any say in that or not.
Speaker 2:I did not.
Speaker 2:I did not Well, I take it back. I have ultimate say in the script. So if the screenplay writer wrote a script that did not mirror my story enough or was not accurate to my story, then I had the right of refusal. Now this process has been going on for seven years. It's been a very slow process, which is, I guess, typical for film, but the story, my book and the movie are similar but different. My book and the movie are similar but different. Now, in the book I have probably 20 friends represented as being characters in the book. You can't have 20 friends in a movie. So we've, I didn't. They narrowed the friends into like three main friends. So the gist of the story is the same but it looks a bit different.
Speaker 1:Some of those details are.
Speaker 2:Some of the story is the same, but it looks a bit different.
Speaker 1:Some of those details are. Some of the details are out.
Speaker 2:yeah, but you had full, like you could say hey or nay on the story. I was there almost every day, Almost every day, yeah.
Speaker 1:What was the most enjoyable and also the most challenging. You kind of alluded to the challenging piece of seeing the film.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, I'll tell you what the last scene of the movie is. It was the hardest scene for me and I'm not going to tell you what it is. In fact we've been interviewed by some film media sources who've had the opportunity to watch the film and they know they're not allowed to say what the final scene is. But they have said they've been very emotional about the final scene. That was the toughest scene for me and I was there that day.
Speaker 2:But the most enjoyable part is knowing how many lives this will I don't want to say change in a in a negative way. I it will. It will light so many paths. It will be such a source of hope and that's my joy. Right, it's not because it's my story, it's not because my name is on it, it's because I know that I'm doing my job in this world to give people hope. And it's not overly, I'll tell you. The movie's not overly religious. There's one scene where she's getting her biopsy and she cuts her hand because she's squeezing a rosary so tight. So the subtleties of faith are in there. But we also, you know it's really we call it a love story that's interrupted by cancer. So there's a lot of good stuff in that movie that I think will give a lot of hope to a lot of people.
Speaker 1:As a kind of a concluding question. So if people want to connect with you, learn more about your story, experience some of the wisdom and the hope that you offer. What's the best place for them to go?
Speaker 2:So I usually direct people to Instagram. It's my kind of most active platform. It's Christine Handy One, but of course my book is called Walk Beside Me. The movie is called Hello Beautiful. If you just Google me, I'm certainly out there. You can find me and I'm accessible. I do respond to most of my messages. I will tell you I do have help, but it's because I have to be on a lot of platforms. I have the privilege of being on a lot of platforms. I have the privilege of putting my life out there.
Speaker 1:So Christine, this was wonderful. I'm just glad that we got to talk Um looking forward to I mean many, many years of the hope that you give to people, looking forward to seeing your film, the hope that you give to people Looking forward to seeing your film, hearing how God has used you, but also like navigating, like every step of the way, between the chemo and the relationships and your team of angels, like it's just, it's really, really inspiring. Thank you so much for tuning in to the Walk Family podcast today. If you haven't realized already, laura and I are switching the format of our show. The primary difference is that we have changed our releases to fit more of a serial format, which means we will be sending out episodes throughout each week for a season. Then, once the next season begins, another series will come out. Each series will contain around 10 to 12 episodes, give or take.
Speaker 1:For the winter season of 2025, seasons of Despair is our series. We still release an episode on Tuesdays, but you may see another episode pop up later in the same week as well. Also, be sure to hit the little bell to subscribe. It gives you each episode instantly once it's published. You can always connect with us at our website, thewalkfmcom, and, if you are really interested, a link in the show notes below allows you to sign up for our monthly newsletter. Our letter contains updates on the Smith family to stay connected with us, while also providing tips, tricks and challenges we are experiencing. If you sign up, you also get a free sneak peek to the first chapter of Prayer and Promises, which is a book that I'm writing and will hopefully be publishing this year. Thanks again and be blessed, blessed.
