Jan. 7, 2025
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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Thanks for listening and supporting our show!
Chapters
00:01 - Seasons of Despair
07:27 - Surviving Trauma and Finding Hope
15:14 - Transformation Through Faith and Support
20:12 - Faith and Support During Illness
30:33 - Spreading Hope Through Faith and Film
38:57 - Changing Format for Weekly Podcast
Transcript
WEBVTT
00:00:01.201 --> 00:00:05.512
Hey everybody, it's Tony and welcome back to the Walk Family Podcast.
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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.
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Laura and I bring to the table conversations from our own home, as well as introduce some guests sharing their stories.
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Everybody goes through trials and tribulations in life.
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Sometimes it feels we can't ever escape the pain that that brings.
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James 1, 2, and 3 says Consider it pure joy.
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My brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, this is easier said than done.
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Despair, by definition, is the loss or absence of hope.
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As a believer in Jesus, there is always that eternal hope we have, but sometimes we don't always feel like it exists.
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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.
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My hope and my prayer is that this series will show that you are not alone in your moments of despair.
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I went to one of my friends and I said listen, I have had enough and I don't know how to move forward.
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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.
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And she looked at me and she said that's a generational burden.
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This is generational.
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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.
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And I had never really thought about that and it's a very selfish act.
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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.
00:02:12.242 --> 00:02:20.691
And she was like you're taking the gift of us participating in this season of your life, and it is a gift.
00:02:20.691 --> 00:02:31.108
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.
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As I was talking with Christine, all I could think about was the word wow.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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That book is also being turned into a film, which comes out sometime in early 2025.
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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.
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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.
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So enough of me talking.
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Here is Christine telling everybody her story.
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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.
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So my name is Christine Handy.
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I am originally from St Louis, missouri.
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I'm a Midwestern girl.
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I currently live in Miami, florida, so I jumped onto the East Coast.
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My family is still, most of them, in St Louis.
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I come from a large family of them in St Louis.
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I come from a large family.
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My father has 10 brothers and sisters and I'm one of four girls, so we have big gatherings at the holidays.
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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.
00:04:44.812 --> 00:04:45.293
That's awesome.
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Tell me a little bit about you.
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Were in St Louis, decided to go to SMU.
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What did you pursue for college?
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So I was in St Louis.
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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.
00:05:03.971 --> 00:05:17.230
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.
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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.
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I still do model.
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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.
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It's like decades later.
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Decades later.
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Well, I'm doing it differently now.
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I'm doing it to help people, because I model in Miami Swim Week without a chest because of my breast cancer debacle.
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Then it helps people realize.
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You know what Her beauty is inside.
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It comes from something different than external, which is, of course, what everybody thinks of as the modeling industry.
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It's all external.
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Well, most of it is, but not when I'm on the runway.
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And I really want to talk about your story with breast cancer.
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But right before that, how was life leading up to it?
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Because I think you were in your early 40s.
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Yes.
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It hit.
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You were probably well into your modeling career, Like what was life like before breast cancer happened.
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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.
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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?
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Well, I think that myself and most of the girls I worked with really struggled with self-esteem.
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So, leading up to my breast cancer diagnosis, I feel like I felt like something was missing.
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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.
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There was something that I wasn't.
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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.
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And all of a sudden I was diagnosed with breast cancer and that was a complete shift for me.
00:07:27.689 --> 00:07:30.814
I'm really intrigued about your book.
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But in the story the main character, which pretty much represents you, has a name change and the name is Willow.
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Why the name change?
00:07:40.708 --> 00:08:15.420
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.
00:08:15.420 --> 00:08:23.110
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.
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So that's why I did that.
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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?
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Or did that buffer kind of do its job?
00:08:36.548 --> 00:08:39.227
Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think it did its job.
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I think that there were some people in my life that were very upset about the vulnerability and the honesty that I wrote.
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But I felt, you know, listen everybody.
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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.
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And I said, well, that's not authentic to my story.
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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.
00:09:10.809 --> 00:09:28.839
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.
00:09:29.201 --> 00:09:39.701
Mm-hmm, yeah, the aspect of having a faith in God, not just prior but through and even like after this journey.
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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.
00:09:47.926 --> 00:09:55.667
And in the story, Willow contemplates suicide right after the diagnosis, like almost immediately after.
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And my question is why, Like you hadn't experienced chemo, you hadn't gone through the treatments?
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Why so quickly?
00:10:05.534 --> 00:10:11.990
Yeah, it's almost as though you contemplate suicide right after the diagnosis, literally, yeah.
00:10:11.990 --> 00:10:12.893
I'm just curious why.
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You know, I felt okay.
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So that was my third major illness.
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I had a colon resection when I was 35.
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I had a really major problem with my right arm when I was 41.
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And I was really bullied by a doctor and I had no faith in the medical community.
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I had very little faith in anything.
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Everything that I felt like was solid ground was rumbling underneath me.
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I felt like I was orphaned.
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I felt like I had no family history of breast cancer, so it came out of nowhere.
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I felt like I was sideswiped in every direction.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Again, that is a distorted, distorted brain.
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That is not a clear brain.
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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.
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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.
00:12:26.000 --> 00:12:33.431
It's a funny it's not funny ha-ha, but it's a funny, interesting story how God shifted that.
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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.
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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.
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I wasn't going to tell my son I was going to take my life and he got postponed again.
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He got in trouble at school again, so for three weekends he couldn't come home.
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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.
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Yeah, and at the time you probably didn't think too much of it, but in hindsight I had no idea.
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I just was like inconvenienced.
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I was like, oh gosh, I have to actually get this port in my chest because I haven't taken my life yet.
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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.
00:13:41.982 --> 00:13:56.548
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.
00:13:57.475 --> 00:14:06.576
The thought of having such a low point and distorting all of those thoughts to cause you to even contemplate and plan out right.
00:14:06.576 --> 00:14:14.658
Taking your own life, Would you say that was truly your lowest point, or did it get lower once you started the treatment?
00:14:15.581 --> 00:14:17.325
No, I would say that was my lowest point.
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I never wanted to take my life after that.
00:14:19.758 --> 00:14:23.184
I had some very dark moments after that.
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That wasn't like clear sailing ahead.
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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.
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I'm very emotional and crying and and I would say that's also a dark moment.
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But I didn't contemplate suicide at that moment.
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I just was like, please hide me.
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I wanted something to shield me from all the pain and all the all the emotional but also of the physical pain.
00:14:57.581 --> 00:15:09.327
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.
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I was like, okay, I'm going to stay away today because this was a very emotional scene for me.
00:15:14.707 --> 00:15:18.639
When we first talked, you had mentioned experiencing some insecurity.
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Did you experience insecurity going through all of your treatment?
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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.
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You know, I'd gotten to nothing.
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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.
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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.
00:15:54.783 --> 00:15:56.019
Well then, I would focus on that.
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Well, what does that mean?
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And I would ask them questions what do you mean?
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God's never going to forsake me?
00:16:00.514 --> 00:16:10.730
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.
00:16:10.815 --> 00:16:17.441
Right, I'm still going through chemo and I'm in the chemo chair every week and, like I said, it was very violent.
00:16:17.441 --> 00:16:23.121
And so there were many moments where I couldn't focus on anything other than I just was trying not to throw up.
00:16:23.121 --> 00:16:29.187
And on the moments that I could focus on it, I was asking a lot of questions and I was diving into faith.
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I wasn't sitting around watching soap operas.
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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.
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Now, not everybody gets that opportunity to focus on faith Like I.
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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.
00:17:17.238 --> 00:17:18.961
Yeah, your team of angels is what?
00:17:19.804 --> 00:17:20.707
I've read.
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I want to talk about them in just a moment.
00:17:23.676 --> 00:17:35.431
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.
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Every week physically exhausting.
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This is emotionally draining.
00:17:47.457 --> 00:17:49.842
How did you see your spirituality or your faith change through those 15 months?
00:17:51.223 --> 00:17:58.625
Well, you know, it's interesting because I'm a mother and during that time my 13 and 11 year old children were.
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I was not able to care for them.
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I was hardly able to care for myself, and so that could lead to more insecurity.
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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.
00:18:15.169 --> 00:18:21.045
But my friends would also say to me no, that we are the hands and the feet of Lord, we'll cover them.
00:18:21.045 --> 00:18:23.999
So they were covering my family, they were covering me.
00:18:23.999 --> 00:18:25.981
So my faith was building.
00:18:25.981 --> 00:18:38.458
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.
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I feel like prior to my diagnosis, everything was externally based.
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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.
00:18:51.921 --> 00:19:00.365
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.
00:19:00.365 --> 00:19:07.021
Relationally, things can be taken away your beauty, you age right, illness takes beauty away.
00:19:07.021 --> 00:19:11.424
Well, when all those things can be taken away and you find yourself in that position.
00:19:11.424 --> 00:19:18.585
You have to really figure out what you're going to focus on, and for me, I had nothing left.
00:19:18.585 --> 00:19:21.515
My ego was gone, my pride was gone.
00:19:21.515 --> 00:19:27.958
I had to focus on something that was life-giving, and that was the only thing that I could figure out.
00:19:27.958 --> 00:19:42.185
That was the only life giving thing that I knew after everything else was taken, where you truly have nothing left.
00:19:42.945 --> 00:19:43.125
And.
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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.
00:19:53.451 --> 00:20:04.736
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.
00:20:04.776 --> 00:20:08.505
So they were a significant part of my.
00:20:08.505 --> 00:20:10.128
First of all, they kept me alive.
00:20:10.128 --> 00:20:12.114
They my.
00:20:12.314 --> 00:20:17.488
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.
00:20:17.488 --> 00:20:25.910
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.
00:20:25.910 --> 00:20:29.644
And she looked at me and she said that's a generational burden.
00:20:29.644 --> 00:20:31.978
This is generational.
00:20:31.978 --> 00:20:40.605
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.
00:20:40.605 --> 00:20:43.472
And I had never really thought about that and it's a very selfish act.
00:20:43.472 --> 00:20:44.615
That's what she told me, and I had never really thought about that.
00:20:44.615 --> 00:20:45.076
And it's a very selfish act.
00:20:45.076 --> 00:20:45.372
That's what she told me.
00:20:45.372 --> 00:20:48.724
And I was like it doesn't feel very selfish.
00:20:48.724 --> 00:20:56.015
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.
00:20:56.015 --> 00:21:04.498
And she was like you're taking the gift of us participating in this season of your life, and it is a gift.
00:21:04.498 --> 00:21:14.917
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.
00:21:15.940 --> 00:21:26.428
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.
00:21:26.428 --> 00:21:31.575
So, just the first month, they got me to save my life, right?
00:21:31.575 --> 00:21:45.855
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.
00:21:45.855 --> 00:21:49.281
They took care of my family, they traveled with me.
00:21:49.281 --> 00:21:54.500
When I went to New York because I had to see my arm surgeon, they filled in the gap.
00:21:54.500 --> 00:21:57.012
Every single day there was somebody at my house.
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Every day.
00:21:57.454 --> 00:22:05.242
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.
00:22:05.924 --> 00:22:20.532
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.
00:22:20.532 --> 00:22:31.483
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.
00:22:31.483 --> 00:22:42.201
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.
00:22:42.201 --> 00:22:51.395
And so I knew that God had a big plan for me and it was my responsibility to share the story of these angels.
00:22:51.395 --> 00:22:53.240
They were the ones that interceded.
00:22:53.320 --> 00:22:56.452
Right, they were the hands and the feet of the Lord, quite literally.
00:22:56.452 --> 00:23:05.932
But my problem was and this is being very honest I almost gave them too much credit instead of giving the credit to God.
00:23:05.932 --> 00:23:13.711
So after my completion of the chemo, it was like, oh, these women saved my life.
00:23:13.711 --> 00:23:21.253
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.
00:23:21.253 --> 00:23:23.921
But the glory is to God, not to them.
00:23:23.921 --> 00:23:25.976
But they were the hands and the feet.
00:23:27.030 --> 00:23:30.439
As far as a team, how many, roughly, would you say?
00:23:31.260 --> 00:23:31.621
30.
00:23:32.041 --> 00:23:32.442
30.
00:23:32.442 --> 00:23:41.462
You had 30 people being used by God to help you navigate 15 months of chemo and all of that.
00:23:44.509 --> 00:23:56.420
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.
00:23:56.420 --> 00:24:03.181
So it was probably more than that, but on a week-to-week basis it was probably 30 women.
00:24:04.691 --> 00:24:07.640
Obviously you felt the Lord working through these women.
00:24:07.640 --> 00:24:09.837
How did it affect your family?
00:24:09.837 --> 00:24:21.826
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?
00:24:22.471 --> 00:24:30.311
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.
00:24:30.311 --> 00:24:38.432
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.
00:24:38.432 --> 00:24:41.176
A sick woman and I became very sick many times.
00:24:41.176 --> 00:24:52.772
And I think he my friends often said, you know, I think he's a little jealous of the attention.
00:24:52.853 --> 00:24:58.490
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.
00:24:58.490 --> 00:25:01.315
Now he couldn't have cared for me like they did, there's no way.
00:25:01.315 --> 00:25:02.195
He had a job.
00:25:02.195 --> 00:25:05.201
He went and visited our son who was at boarding school.
00:25:05.201 --> 00:25:14.490
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.
00:25:14.490 --> 00:25:22.921
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.
00:25:24.972 --> 00:25:26.096
How did it affect your kids?
00:25:27.190 --> 00:25:34.994
So you know they were boys, they are boys and boys, especially at that age, have a difficult time emoting their feelings.
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They often can't label right, so fear translates into anger.
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