Ellie Ledin (00:00.894)
Hey all, welcome to the Inheritance of Hope podcast. I'm Ellie, I'm your host today, and I'm joined by a special guest who is very near and dear in the Inheritance of Hope family that I'd love for you to introduce yourself and tell people who you are and a little bit of your story.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (00:21.23)
Yeah, sure. I'm Amy Shaw. And I was served with my family on a retreat in April of 2019. We were flown down to Orlando and put up in a hotel and just given the most beautiful, amazing, loving family treatment that you could imagine. We had never had such a experience like that.
especially in such a difficult time. we, my husband and I were married for 24 and a half years. And in 2018, after we had built a large family, we have 10 children. We had biological children. We had lost three of our own babies, one a full term stillborn. And following that devastating loss, we ended up
adopting, adopting children from around the world, recognizing that we were a family that had lost children and that there were children around the world that had lost families. And my husband was the one who initiated adoption. He called me from work and asked if I would consider that. And we, we did. We jumped on it. And in five years time, we adopted six children from around the world. So both from Uganda and China.
Ellie Ledin (01:43.102)
Wow.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (01:46.894)
And so we had our family going and their kids with special needs. And it was just a very big, I don't know, I think about the 12 of us coming down the road in this very large van. And we would stop at a rest stop and the doors would open and people would watch. kids would come out and come out and come out and come out. We've had several times people come up and say, are you that family on TV?
Ellie Ledin (01:57.973)
You
Ellie Ledin (02:04.51)
Mm-hmm.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (02:12.01)
no there's no TV show for us. Thank the Lord. That would have been a little crazy. But we had this large family and about maybe a year, a year and a few months after bringing home our final two daughters, my husband, very out of the blue, came home one day from work very unexpectedly. He'd never taken a sick day in all of our marriage. And so he came home at 9 30 in the morning. I was like, what are you doing?
Ellie Ledin (02:13.012)
Yeah.
Ellie Ledin (02:38.196)
Wow.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (02:42.022)
and he went to bed and he had mentioned that people at work had the flu, so I just assumed he had the flu. I put the children on the bus, the afternoon preschool bus, and went and checked on him and he could not say a sentence, speak a sentence that made any sense. He was tripping over words, he was word searching, he was very frustrated and he had a really bad headache. And he kept stopping and holding his head and he would pray that God would help him with his words.
Which was so weird. I had never seen him do something like that. And I kept walking out of the room thinking maybe he just needs a second. And then I'd come back in and he would do it again. And I was like, Brian, if you don't stop, I'm going to need to call the ambulance. And he stood up to really get my attention. And he called me by her daughter's name. And I was like, what? It was so frightening. So yeah, 911.
Ellie Ledin (03:20.276)
Hmm.
Ellie Ledin (03:33.993)
Wow.
Ellie Ledin (03:38.804)
Mm.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (03:40.238)
They came, they assessed him, they ruled out a stroke, and I had no idea what was going on. And they took him in the squad, and by the time I got to the ER, the doctor pulled me aside and he said, there's a mass in his brain, and we're gonna transfer him to a larger hospital. And I was like, what? It was just so, so shocking. And we had a daughter who was
Ellie Ledin (04:04.243)
Mm-hmm.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (04:08.94)
It was, it must've been her spring break because it was in March and she was about to get on a plane to go to Argentina and she was gonna do some ministry down there. And so I called to let her know that the ambulance came and took dad to the hospital. I'm sure it's nothing. You can probably go, I just wanted you to know. Well, it wasn't nothing. It was actually the most aggressive form of brain cancer that you can have. And
Fast forward a couple of days, he had an emergency brain surgery. A couple weeks later, we finally got the pathology back and he had absolutely had the full grade four glioblastoma and the DNA of the tumor was such that it was gonna be resistant to treatment and everything they told us was like the worst of the worst. just, we were just so shocked and so.
Ellie Ledin (04:53.363)
you
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (05:07.438)
blown away that this could even happen. I mean, we'd already had our share of losses. We buried a child, a baby casket. You know, we had done that. We had just buried his dad about two years before, not even two years before that. And so it was just like, what? How can this happen? And we were confused and shocked and sad and angry and didn't believe, you know, just all of those things. But I'll...
Ellie Ledin (05:13.649)
Mm-hmm.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (05:37.422)
kind of scroll back a little bit to the ER, we made it, I guess I made a decision to call the kids out of school. And we had a real open communication style between my husband and I and then with our children. And so I called them for them to come out of school and a friend went around with my big van and picked them up. And I remember I've talked to my kids about it and they were.
Ellie Ledin (05:41.587)
Hmm.
Ellie Ledin (06:00.723)
Hmm.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (06:04.394)
very confused, very frightened. Why are we all getting out of school? What's going on? And a pastor had made his way to the hospital before my kids got there. And he did something that was so profound. He pulled me aside and he said, Amy, your children will always remember today. You have the opportunity to shape how they remember it.
Ellie Ledin (06:25.523)
Mm.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (06:31.246)
And that was so insightful because it helped me kind of pull up to that 30,000 foot view of my own story that I didn't know how I was going to go. I was scared. And be able to say, OK, how do I want to help my children remember this? And I go back to that. And I really think that was part of something that out in my story here about
Ellie Ledin (06:38.493)
Yeah.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (06:59.502)
how is this narrative gonna go? It just kinda helped me think about things. And so when we did get that diagnosis, when that pathology really did come back, because we kept hoping, you know, maybe, is there a chance that it could maybe not be? And the surgeon was like, wow, I guess there's a 3 % chance that it's just an abscess. That's what it was.
Ellie Ledin (07:12.157)
Mm-hmm.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (07:25.858)
And so we had everyone around the world praying that it's an abscess. And I was hoping when I was, remember waiting in that waiting room and just hoping that they were gonna come out quickly. And the hours passed and he came out about, I don't know, two, three hours later and he said, it's grade four. And I was like, wait, what is grade four? Cause he'd only talked to us about grade three, that it could possibly be grade three. And so when he came out and said grade four, I was just like,
Ellie Ledin (07:52.115)
Hmm.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (07:55.458)
What does that mean? And as the weeks passed and we got a real understanding of what this meant, it was very serious and just super heavy. mean, here we're getting this news that my husband has a terminal diagnosis and he, the surgeon was, he calls it like it is. He's like, there's a hundred percent chance you're going to die. I I suppose that's true of all of us, but from this cancer, there are nobody.
Ellie Ledin (08:17.747)
Wow. Yeah.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (08:25.774)
Nobody has survived it. Now some people have survived 10 years. There's an outlier woman that I got to know and I think she lived maybe 22 years. But most people, I think it's like 95 % of cases are gone before the five-year mark. And so with my husband's type of DNA of his tumor, they predicted he with, if we tried treatment, he might get 12 months.
Ellie Ledin (08:30.193)
Thank
Ellie Ledin (08:36.499)
Wow.
Ellie Ledin (08:43.859)
Yeah.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (08:54.336)
And so it was just such, such a shock.
Ellie Ledin (08:58.989)
No kidding.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (09:00.462)
and we came into an inheritance of hope a year after that. So he was diagnosed in March and we came on our retreat in April of 2019. So it had already been 13 months. that actually that year, that 2019 was an amazing gift from God up on high because all of 2019, all 12 months and all the way to March of 2020,
Ellie Ledin (09:07.539)
Hmm.
Ellie Ledin (09:15.185)
Wow.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (09:28.216)
Brian had no treatment, he was not on any medication, and he felt great. And we would go back and get our scans every three months and they would say, nope, nothing's there. And it was just like, amazing. And so I do believe that he was healed in that time. It just wasn't a permanent healing because the cancer didn't come back.
Ellie Ledin (09:34.791)
Yeah.
Ellie Ledin (09:48.104)
Hmm. Sure. Wow, what a story. No kidding, that's crazy how I, this is something I hear very frequently as I'm doing these interviews, is that, you know, everything was normal.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (09:53.166)
Yes.
Ellie Ledin (10:06.543)
And then that one day, that one thing that was just like, where did that seizure come from? Where did this ER trip come from? Like it was just a cough. It was just a headache, you know, and then people's worlds were just completely shifted.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (10:17.966)
Yeah.
Ellie Ledin (10:25.987)
What was that like for you to then realize, everything is changing. And it started with that one day and then getting the pathology back. How did you pivot as a family?
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (10:44.12)
That's a really good question. I remember watching and observing Brian in the hospital and that was, I almost think I pivoted internally a little bit easier than he did. When he came home that day, it was March 8th, he never went back to work again. And I remember seeing his clothes that he had taken off to put on something more comfortable to climb in bed that day. I remember seeing, I can see that shirt in my mind.
Ellie Ledin (11:03.239)
Hmm.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (11:13.442)
I remember seeing it laying over the chair and I remember having a sense it's almost, I don't even know how I knew this. It was almost like I heard the sentence that he'll never go back to work again. And so I was already dealing with that on my own terms and I don't know if that was, you know, an internal divine voice helping me. But Brian struggled so much that whole time in the hospital, he kept asking the surgeon some of the same questions over and over and over.
Ellie Ledin (11:23.827)
you
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (11:42.22)
You mean my life will never be back to the same? Like he just couldn't, I don't know, comprehend it because it was so unfathomable. Nothing in all of our lives had been such a pivot. We had had a huge pivot when our son passed away. But nothing to this level where it was actually going to take Brian out of the story. Like we'd had our story shift before, but not.
Ellie Ledin (11:45.757)
Mm.
Ellie Ledin (12:08.211)
Mm.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (12:10.806)
removing him and so I think it was extremely hard for him but we made a choice to tell our kids and and that's something that I as I am working with families I always really encourage that openness with your children with your extended family I mean every family has to make that decision for themselves but for us with our kids they were 18 to 3 we had 10 kids in that range that we
We just, that was how we operated. And we sat them down after we actually got the real pathology report that really said this, because we were still hoping, hoping beyond, you know, that maybe the surgeon didn't really know. But when we finally got that, you know, sitting down and saying, okay, this is what the situation is. And we handled it very openly. We talked about the word death. We talked about the word cancer. We didn't go into the...
Ellie Ledin (12:54.067)
Mm-hmm.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (13:10.414)
nitty gritty with the kids because some of them were so little. But I think and it kind of I mean that was early that was 2018. The pandemic came two years later and my husband was still here and that pandemic really sealed us in as a family and where you know in some takes on the pandemic it was it was bad for business it was bad for all these other things in school and education for sure.
Ellie Ledin (13:24.498)
Hmm.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (13:39.362)
But it was really good for our family because we cemented together, we pulled together. We had just amazing discussions and that kind of thing during that time. But the pivot was huge because he didn't go back to work. He got on disability right away. When you have such a scary diagnosis like glioblastoma, you know, they grant you that disability immediately. And so...
Ellie Ledin (13:59.646)
Mm-hmm.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (14:04.832)
Suddenly he was home every day all day, which to me was a delight and just as such a gift because we loved to be together. And you know, the pivot was it was a good one. If you can just forget that there's cancer to deal with. I mean, we loved being together and Brian loved to make hot breakfast. And so he was extremely creative and inventive. And the kids, you know, would have rotating breakfasts and
Ellie Ledin (14:11.891)
Mm.
Ellie Ledin (14:22.044)
Right.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (14:32.48)
I don't even know, do they know how good they had it? I do not make a hot breakfast before school. But yeah, it was really great in that sense. pivoting to, think, I'm trying to answer your question about the pivot question. We were already caretaking for our children that we had adopted with special needs. There was a lot.
Ellie Ledin (14:35.183)
Hehehehe. Hehehehe.
Ellie Ledin (14:43.955)
Hmm.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (15:00.362)
a lot, a lot, a lot of travel back and forth to doctors and surgeries that they had and therapies that they had that now it was kind of just adding my husband into that. And because just because the cancer started didn't mean that any of those other needs that we had lessened. They didn't. So it was like just adding this other layer. And then of course it really was, you know, and I've tried to help other people
Ellie Ledin (15:19.763)
Great.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (15:30.028)
with the things that I learned during that. Like I didn't understand about clinical trials. I didn't understand about different medications. And so I just went to work and I had amazing friends help us. They came alongside us. And I had a friend who established an email address so that when people wanted to give me advice and I couldn't take it, they would send it to this email and she would process it and read it. And so that was just a really helpful thing.
Ellie Ledin (15:56.051)
Wow.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (15:59.758)
But yeah, it was a pivot unlike anything else.
Ellie Ledin (16:04.197)
Yeah, well and when you add children into the mix, you know, whether you have one kid or ten,
that kind of ups the game because it's not just, you know, adults processing difficult news. It is you have to regulate what you are experiencing and then inform, educate, comfort, help your kids regulate all these things. So I love that you got the advice of, you get to shape how your kids remember this day because I mean, kids are just so resilient, but they're also
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (16:35.491)
Yeah.
Ellie Ledin (16:41.941)
so perceptive, you know? And so I used to work with kids in the hospital and when we would work with kids, would, it felt like we were working with adults almost more because it's like the parent, how they are doing, informs how the child is doing because the child then perceives, do you feel unsafe? I am then unsafe. And so for you to not only just on that
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (16:43.982)
Yeah.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (16:58.424)
Yeah.
Ellie Ledin (17:11.941)
day but every day since, you know, show up to your inner world and process this, you know, with your husband and then after loss and then show up so consistently into your kids lives is huge and a huge task but so worth it because then it kind of helps shape, you know, their perspective and their experience of it all. So...
I guess I don't really have a question in that, but just an observation of the importance of that. yeah, I guess would you have anything that you would share to other parents on how to engage these kinds of conversations with their kids?
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (17:48.472)
Yeah.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (17:57.186)
Yeah, I have talked with a lot of different families and some families that are, they've already gone through it and they have volunteered the information that they chose to do it opposite of how we did it. They decided to protect the kids. And I want to say air quotes around protect the kids because the adults think that they're protecting the kids. But from a child's perspective,
You're not protecting us, you're keeping information from us and it makes us frustrated. We want to know what's going on. And that is straight out of the mouth of one of my children. you know...
And we felt like we were telling the kids and I've still heard that. But some families that I've talked with have gone to the extreme of not telling the children that the parent is terminal until almost right before. And it has alienated those kids from the remaining parent. They're angry. don't they feel kind of like they were they were cut out of an opportunity to
Ellie Ledin (18:41.715)
Mm.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (19:07.048)
what's going on, number one, but also to have that time with that parent. And I guess this could be grandmother or, you know, extended family, but I think especially a parent when you, you may think that you're protecting them, but it may come from a place of, don't know how I feel about this as an adult. I don't know how I'm going to process this. So how could I possibly tell my children when I can't?
Ellie Ledin (19:11.379)
Mm-hmm.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (19:32.942)
I'm not okay with this. And so I think, I mean, my advice would be understand that nobody knows. And that was something we said to our kids. We don't know how this is gonna go. We are, we're in this with, know, we're all together in this and we don't know how this is gonna go, but we know and we had our faith to lean on. And we were able to say, God is always.
Ellie Ledin (19:35.431)
Yeah.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (20:00.174)
always come through for us no matter how hard the hardship and the kids know that they have siblings that aren't here that are in heaven and that they know that we've gone through hard stuff and we've talked about that my husband got a rock a large rock from the field and had me start writing in a bright colored sharpies different words to trigger memories so that we could say they say
What does this mean about a white car? Why does it say white car on this rock? Like, let us tell you the story. Somebody gave our family a white car when we were in desperate need of another car and someone gave us a car. And like just watching these, you know, the kids understand like, there's a whole legacy here of a whole story ongoing. We're a part of a story that's ongoing. God's been faithful all the way through. He's promised us to never leave us and abandon us.
Ellie Ledin (20:32.178)
Hmm.
Ellie Ledin (20:49.874)
you
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (20:55.438)
So we can not only look at the history, but we have a promise to go forward on. And so that was how we did that. Like, hey kids, we don't know either. And I will say, we never hid our tears from our kids. We cried with our kids. There were a lot of times I had a kid in my arms who was sobbing and I couldn't help crying too. And there were also times where I was overwhelmed and I would say, I need to go cry.
Ellie Ledin (21:18.214)
Yeah.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (21:23.118)
And I would shut my door and go and deal with myself and come back and say, okay, I'm back. But I think that that helped normalize tears. It helped normalize processing. mean, they saw, they saw us not know. They saw us trust God. They saw us be real. And, you we had those meltdowns and I have thought through this a lot. I think we probably cried at least every day during, my husband had 37 months.
Ellie Ledin (21:43.634)
Mm.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (21:52.494)
from March of 2018, he passed into glory in April of 2021. It was 37 months, so the doctors were wrong. And every day of that, at least in some form, there were tears. But there was a lot of joy too, because kind of the way we handled it was, oh my goodness, like,
Ellie Ledin (21:52.615)
Wow.
Ellie Ledin (22:03.909)
Yeah.
Ellie Ledin (22:12.275)
Mm.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (22:21.036)
You get everything. Brian, you're going to go to heaven. Like, my goodness. I remember asking him, what do you want to do? know, bucket list kind of stuff. What do you want to do before the end comes? And he's like, actually, Amy, I'm getting everything. So what do you want to do? What's important to you to do with me? And I was like, I want to go to Paris. So we did. We took a trip to Paris. But I loved his perspective on it. He knew that he was about to have everything.
Ellie Ledin (22:37.053)
Hmm.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (22:50.026)
And so I think that all went into how we helped our kids talk about death and eternity and what this means. And yeah, it was, I would say it's an uncommon way of talking with your children through the process, but it was really beneficial.
Ellie Ledin (23:03.207)
Wow.
Ellie Ledin (23:10.035)
Mm.
Yeah, I want to touch on that because if someone is listening who is not a believer, who doesn't have a relationship with the Lord and they hear you talking with such passion and calm and joy about something as difficult as losing your husband to this really aggressive cancer and his approach of, am gaining everything as he's approaching death. I mean, that doesn't
make sense to most people. I want you to share what your perspective is on that and and how you can talk about such heavy things with such joy and peace.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (23:55.394)
Wow, that is, that's an amazing question. I hear what you're saying and I definitely get looks of, do you have two heads? Because this doesn't make sense. This is counter-cultural. I think understanding the truth of who God is, who his son Jesus is, and I don't know if you're asking for me to explain that or not.
Ellie Ledin (24:08.796)
Mmm.
Ellie Ledin (24:24.881)
Yeah, go for it.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (24:25.506)
But yeah, you know, God created us to be in relationship with him and that was severed early on in the very first set of people that were ever made. and, then his son, Jesus came and he, and he fixed it for us. I mean, he went to the cross, he paid the debt, he fulfilled it. He took the curse. There was a curse on all humanity because we, we
We were sinful and there was a law given long ago, the Mosaic Law, which sounds like a mosaic that you have. I'm an artist, so I think about a mosaic in terms of a pretty color glass window, but that's not what that means. It's like Moses and like Moses went up on this mountain and he got these Ten Commandments and this law, heavy, heavy law. I'm sure people have heard of the Ten Commandments, but if you don't keep even one tiny part of the Ten Commandments, you've broken the whole thing and nobody can keep everything.
Ellie Ledin (25:02.811)
Mm-hmm
haha
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (25:25.098)
And so there was this thing that there's a blessing if you can keep it and there's a curse if you can't. And so everybody falls into that category if we can't, we can't keep it. So we were cursed people. And I think if you're still in that place, then everything is upsetting and a diagnosis like this is horrifying and it's the worst possible thing. But when you recognize
actually there has been a solution. A solution has come and his name is Jesus Christ and he came and he became the curse and he removed the curse and he now hands the blessing. We have full right as if we never ever did anything wrong. Like that's phenomenal news. Like what? But that is the Christian message.
And you know, it took me years to understand that. grew up in a family that went to church, but I did not understand that until I was 15 years old. And I was like, what? That's what that means? my goodness, this has every impact on my life. And so I think so now as somebody who's living without a curse, I'm living in this blessing that comes from God because God took my, he took my sin, he took my curse, he became all of that.
Ellie Ledin (26:28.797)
Thank
Ellie Ledin (26:33.756)
Yeah.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (27:15.98)
The truth is that we all live this life. We live this earthly life. actually, I wrote a book and I talked about how the spirit, the spirit world has always existed. And we came from the spirit world. So God created, he spoke and he created the very first people. They're the ones that fell into sin. And then we've all followed like dominoes. We've all fallen as well.
Ellie Ledin (27:42.131)
Hmm.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (27:44.92)
But then he interjected himself into the earthly life and he became the curse. He lifted the curse. And now we are able to extend into eternity. Well, we were going to extend either way because we have a spirit, soul and body. And so when you live under that curse, you're going to be separated from God forever. But when you have this joy of being in the blessing and having Jesus in your life and you know God, is
literally the best adventure I've ever been on. I've been on a lot of cool things like in Indonesia and China and all these amazing experiences, but the best adventure I've ever been on has been walking with God and literally the story of glioblastoma is part of the adventure. And now I will be honest and it didn't look like that at the time. It did not. It was very upsetting, but I always had this knowing that
Ellie Ledin (28:17.938)
Hmm.
Ellie Ledin (28:37.204)
Yeah.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (28:44.224)
It's all going to be okay. And I talk about that 30,000 foot view that the pastor gave me. But really, a lot of times I have to ask myself, let's zoom up even higher. Let's go 10,000 years in the future. In 10,000 years in the future, will what I'm worried about right now or what I'm concerned about or what's troubling me matter? An answer is usually no.
Sometimes it is. If it's about someone's understanding of what Jesus has done, then it does matter. But pretty much everything else, we're all going through this door of eternity. It's like a veil. And there are some really amazing, beautiful things that you can know in the world today when you have that perspective. But it's all coming. Like amazing life is coming.
Ellie Ledin (29:37.396)
you
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (29:41.602)
truly for the ones who understand that the curse has been removed and they have to like want that. They want to have the curse removed and I certainly do. I don't want anything to do with that and I will tell you that when you start understanding that more joy comes and more joy comes and more joy comes and you can, I literally lost my best friend, my life. I mean he was my soul mate and I am doing
Ellie Ledin (29:51.668)
Mm.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (30:09.762)
Well, in fact, my husband took me in his arms and he put his hands on my cheeks and he said, Amy, you and the kids are going to soar. You are just going to soar. And I think that was such a gift. It was such a prophetic word into my life because I believed him and it was a hard moment. was close to when he was about to pass, but he told me that and I believed him. And I think, you know,
Ellie Ledin (30:11.059)
you
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (30:37.8)
his life and in his celebration of life ceremony, I calculated how many days he was given. And I put it on the little card that we handed out to everyone with the intention that hopefully people will wonder. I wonder how many days I get. And I think about that. I literally think about, I think about Brian every day, but I think about my own.
Ellie Ledin (30:55.155)
Hmm.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (31:01.902)
How many days left do I have? And I want to use them so well. just, want to influence the world. I want to let people know there's more to this. There's so much more to this. You can have so much joy. Yes, even in hardship. Almost especially in hardship because you learn to rely on a source that is not your own. That was a long answer.
Ellie Ledin (31:24.915)
you
No, I love it. We need to like put that everywhere. That's such a good telling of the gospel story and it makes me think of something we talk about a lot in the inheritance of hope staff and family that you know it's not like a before Jesus after Jesus before Jesus everything was terrible and after Jesus everything is amazing. It's like no we're in yeah like this earthly realm we're
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (31:56.622)
Yeah.
Ellie Ledin (31:57.078)
go wrong. Like that is just part of the deal that we have. And it's not like things are magically taken away and you're never gonna have a bad day or a terminal diagnosis, an unexpected loss. No, that's not the gospel story is like once you accept Jesus
The magic wand has been waved, but it is once you have Jesus, are you get this holy detachment from the things of the world where it's like this. If I did not have hope in a different eternity with the Lord, this would be the end of the world for me. This diagnosis, this losing my best friend, I would have no hope outside of this. But with Jesus, it's like this holy detachment of like, yes, this matters to me, of course.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (32:27.406)
Hmm.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (32:43.927)
Absolutely.
Ellie Ledin (32:49.493)
Like your husband was your world, I'm sure and that's not like an easy thing like, okay. He's gone now No, absolutely not But you have this detachment where it's like, okay I have kind of one foot in this world one foot in this eternal perspective and one day yeah, you're gonna Your the troubles of this world aren't gonna be here because you aren't going to be in this world anymore Not because you have Jesus
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (32:56.662)
Yeah, not easy.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (33:17.742)
Mm-hmm.
Ellie Ledin (33:19.554)
and things are amazing now. Like we have hope and we have peace and everything with Jesus, but yeah.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (33:27.02)
Yeah, I was just thinking I just told somebody I think I was talking to somebody else when I told some of my daughters this that I feel like.
In a way, when you really unlock who Jesus is, and I would say for 30 years I didn't really unlock it, but through the incredible pain of losing my husband and a couple other events that all culminated at the same time because of that, I was beyond desperate. And because I'd already had a faith and I'd already seen enough of the world, I knew that I didn't want to run to alcohol, I didn't want to run to
you know, any other type of filler. I knew what I needed was God and I thought I already had him and I did already have him. But what I did was I went to God and I said, OK, this is turned up so high that the pain in my life has been dialed up to a point that I'm about to like literally lose it. I mean, I was losing it. And I basically said, either you give me more of you or I'm going to die. It was.
that desperate and it was in those desperate terms that God was like, okay, you want it, you're going to get it. And I'll tell you what, Ellie, he blew apart so many things that I thought I understood and they are so much better than what I thought. I remember thinking, Jesus, you're like that? No way. And it's almost like
Ellie Ledin (34:49.267)
you
Ellie Ledin (34:58.673)
Yeah.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (35:02.402)
And I think a lot of a lot of your listeners are not going to be able to see my hand motions, but I'm kind of like pointing forward and like a tunnel ahead. And that is that is my relationship with with Jesus. And it's on an every day minute by minute. Like I think about him all the time and I take everything to him and like, I don't know what to do. What should I do? And I'm always talking to him. And he like sometimes I will burst out laughing. And it's because I really believe he told me something and it was so stinking funny.
Because God has a sense of humor and God is in a good mood. And that's like crazy to the world. Like I think the perspective of God is this heavenly policeman and he's ready to catch you in something you're done wrong. And actually he is hysterically funny and he's always in a good mood. And so it's almost like my whole focus, I mean, I'm a widowed mom with 10 kids. Like that is heavy.
Ellie Ledin (35:32.293)
You
Ellie Ledin (35:42.429)
Mm.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (35:56.93)
But my focus, my joy is on my relationship with him. And because of that, yeah, trouble comes all the time on the sides. And it's kind of like, OK, let's deal with this, Jesus. And I mean, the secret of life is that he already knows how to deal with stuff. He already knows how to deal with stuff. I got to tell you a quick story. had after Brian died, our freezer started leaking.
There was so much going on that I was just mopping up the water. It didn't occur to me. It literally did not even occur to me. I should fix the freezer. I just mopped up the water. Well, the bottom of the freezer was freezing more more liquid. And it got to the point that I had this chunk of ice that was probably eight inches thick. Because a good year had passed that I had been mopping up this water. Probably anybody else would have thought to fix this freezer. I didn't. So at some point, one of my dear friends was with me.
Ellie Ledin (36:40.755)
Mm.
Ellie Ledin (36:50.874)
haha
you
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (36:56.64)
And she probably mentioned it because it was just one of those things I didn't even notice. And it was 1130 at night and we started getting on YouTube about how to fix this thing. And we tried, we pulled the free, the whole thing out. We're, my gosh, there's so much dirt behind there and all this stuff and we're trying to fix it. We're doing all the things that YouTube says to do and it is not working. And it is looking like not only do I need to call somebody for help, but I've made a horrible mess and.
Ellie Ledin (37:10.735)
Yeah.
Ellie Ledin (37:23.635)
.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (37:24.8)
I remember sitting in the dirt behind the refrigerator and it dawned on me. Wait a second. I'm like really close to the God of the universe. He knows how to do all kinds of stuff. And I asked him, do you know how to fix freezers? And literally I sat there and I was like, Lord, I bet you do. I bet you know how to fix this freezer.
Ellie Ledin (37:44.23)
you
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (37:51.584)
And so I just sat there and I got a picture of something in my mind and I got up, I went around to the front of the freezer and I fiddled my hand up in this thing and I found something and I kind of finagled it and it literally fixed the freezer. And I was like, yeah, I have a handyman and his name is Jesus. I mean, it was just really, really so cool. And you know, it was just amazing. And the next day,
Ellie Ledin (38:06.085)
No way.
Yes.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (38:19.98)
you know, we got up and the first thing we did was run to the freezer to see if it fixed and it was honestly fixed. Like literally it fixed the freezer and there was no YouTube about it and it was just it was amazing and I have seen him do that for me over and over and over again and I think that he delights in showing me that and I am quite sure I've heard him giggle. Like you didn't know I could do that, did you? But like he is the anyway.
Ellie Ledin (38:24.722)
Wow.
Ellie Ledin (38:29.351)
Mm.
Yeah.
Ellie Ledin (38:42.983)
You
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (38:47.212)
So it's a pursuit of a relationship and it's joy infused as we walk these things and as problems come and they get inserted and I've had a lot of problems. I've had a lot of problems since Brian died. It's been four years and it's been four years of problems, but Jesus has been faithful to every single thing and not every problem is solved even now, but I have full confidence that he will.
Ellie Ledin (38:47.399)
Yeah.
Ellie Ledin (39:01.875)
Mm.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (39:14.892)
And that just gives you joy. mean, it really does. It gives you this perspective of life as an adventure. And there is nothing that can be thrown that will undo that for me.
Ellie Ledin (39:28.379)
Right.
Yeah, and what a tangible way that the Lord showed his nearness of, I don't know if Brian was kind of your handyman and he would, yeah, so in the way that Brian would have, you know, fixed that freezer, it's so sweet to see how the Lord comes near to us in something as tangible as, you know, being kind of the handyman and like giving you that image of how to fix it. And I think
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (39:38.573)
he was. Yeah.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (39:44.088)
Mm-hmm.
Ellie Ledin (39:59.286)
It's not super common, unfortunately, for people to have described their relationship with God in that way. Like, we're close. I can ask Him when I'm in trouble or when I need this thing, how to help or, you know, how does this turn out? What's my next step? So I hope that people listening are really just inspired by that and challenged by it too. Just like take a look at how do you think about God? Because that is
one of the most important questions of your life of like what do I think of God and and that shapes so much. Yeah.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (40:29.646)
It is. Yeah.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (40:38.272)
It does. And I think it also that that shapes how I move through the world. You know, I think when you when you don't know God or you see him as somebody who's angry with you or who's fed up with you or has a narrative of like, really, you did it again, you know, that's not how he is. In fact, he gave Jesus. And so when you do mess up again, he's like, hey, I can apply.
the blood of my son again. like he, that's what he did this for. You're the very reason that he did it. He loves you, even if you've done like all these horrible things. And I, I was gonna say something. Now I forget. It vanished out of my mind. I'm sorry. But I do think that there's more, I had someone ask me if there's one message that my life could tell and it's.
Ellie Ledin (41:09.107)
Hmm.
Ellie Ledin (41:25.841)
That's okay.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (41:34.798)
it would be there's more than what you think and it's better than what you think. That's what I was going to say. Now it came back to me that when you move through the world fearing God and you move through the world and it's trouble, trouble, dealing with this person, dealing with this person, having a critical spirit, it's almost like you're looking for trouble and you find what you look for. I recently I noticed I'm like, is it raining? Oh my gosh, it's raining. And I looked out the window and it was bright sun.
Ellie Ledin (41:37.885)
Yeah.
Ellie Ledin (41:54.941)
Yeah.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (42:01.986)
And I went running outside looking for a rainbow because I know that sun and water make a rainbow. So I went looking for a rainbow. I was searching, searching, and there it is. It was so exciting. And I thought, man. I saw a rainbow because I went to look for a rainbow. I could have stayed in the house and be like, yeah, it's raining again. And I wouldn't have seen the rainbow. But it's a choice.
Ellie Ledin (42:20.273)
Mm.
Ellie Ledin (42:24.443)
Mm.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (42:29.642)
I've had a lot of trouble in my life, but I have more joy in my life than I would have ever believed. But it's how do you move through the world? Do you move through the world understanding that you've been forgiven and everything that God thinks of you is love and adoring and he delights in you? You get that kind of an understanding of that's who you really are. Then you can move through the world in great anticipation of goodness. And yeah, there's problems. They don't vanish.
And there, you I would never tell anybody like, yeah, just trust in Jesus and it'll all go well. But in some sense, it goes better than you could believe because he is better than you know. And that's what I'm so excited about going to heaven because it's going to be better than we know. that was reminds me of something I told the kids was we have a whole.
Ellie Ledin (42:59.986)
Mm.
Ellie Ledin (43:05.764)
Yeah.
Ellie Ledin (43:11.504)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (43:25.24)
holy privilege to walk daddy down the red carpet to the door of eternity. And he's going to have the best walk approach if he understands that we're going to be okay. So instead of taking that typical stance of, don't leave us. How are we going to do this without you? You know, and just pleading, you know, with him, with God, all those things. We were like, my goodness, what are you going to get? You know, and getting excited for what Brian was going to get to do. And the kids got
Ellie Ledin (43:30.29)
Mm.
Ellie Ledin (43:36.114)
Hmm.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (43:53.87)
thinking and brainstorming all these hysterical scenarios in heaven of what they were going to get to do, of he was going to get to do. But then also assuring him that we would be OK. Because thinking about it from a father's perspective, mean, here we've got this huge family, 10 children, all these special needs. My wife is going to be left to do everything. And he knew how incompetent I was.
Ellie Ledin (43:57.299)
You
Ellie Ledin (44:04.626)
you
Ellie Ledin (44:19.472)
Hahaha
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (44:22.808)
He could have really worried, but that was where I rallied the kids and said, it's our job to say, we're going to be okay. And we know we will be okay because God is good and he will not abandon his children. And so there was a time and I learned this later and it absolutely thrilled my heart. My husband and my oldest daughter were in the car together and he told her, I'm actually really excited to go to heaven. And I thought,
That is exactly what I wanted. I wanted him to be able to walk through the end stages of a terrible disease. Unfair, completely unfair. He was 47 when he took his last breath. So, ugh, it's awful. But he was able to do it with anticipation of what was coming and knowing that we were gonna be okay. That was a gift unlike anything else. So.
Ellie Ledin (44:53.756)
Hmm.
Ellie Ledin (45:08.07)
Hmm.
Ellie Ledin (45:12.348)
Yeah.
Ellie Ledin (45:17.874)
Yeah, that's beautiful and I think it really shapes the passion, you know, you show up to the world with and your intentionality. know legacy is something that's so key and essential to your life. So I want to hear more like what as an artist, as a creative person, what has this grief journey
created in you and like how has legacy played a part in that and just kind of share with the world what you're up to these days.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (45:55.906)
Yeah, I'm thinking about a piece of art that I can see while I'm sitting here that was done during our journey. And that's probably something I could share about later. But I actually ended up writing a book called Navigating Goodbye. And that's a picture of my husband and I on the beach in the last four months of his life that we had friends who rallied together and pulled money together and sent us on one final epic vacation. And we had a photographer take that amazing photo.
But basically I used everything we'd been through, all the things I learned the hard way about hospice and about just the clinical trials and how do you learn stuff about medications and treatments and all of that. And I bundled it up, I kind of boiled it down and bundled it up in this book. Tried to give people a perspective of eternity and shortcuts in the medical world as well as.
How do you leave a legacy? How do you leave a good legacy? And I will say a lot of my book has inheritance of hope in it because you guys were critical in our ability to recognize now is the time to leave the legacy. Brian in 2019 recorded a one hour legacy video while we were on our retreat. So amazing. And then he continued to do stuff. We did a wedding walk with our children, with our daughters.
Ellie Ledin (47:20.882)
you
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (47:21.838)
They wore wedding dresses, my wedding dress, my mom's wedding dress, and all six of our daughters. Brian walked them all down the aisle in this amazing ceremony we had. And my oldest daughter's getting married in July and we'll be able to play the video footage of that. So that's kind of emotional legacy. And then all that preparation also, the stuff you don't really want to talk about. I've got
stuff in the book about that. really also, think something else that I really feel passionate for is how when you know someone, maybe you don't have a diagnosis or your family, but you know someone like my neighbor across the street or somebody at work, how do I help them? And so I wrote a chapter in my book for that person. Here's what to do. Here's what not to do. Here's what to say. Here's what not to say. Here are some practical ideas. And then I
Ellie Ledin (48:09.043)
you
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (48:15.572)
also wrote a piece in there to the diagnosed family, Let Them Help You, and why it's important in the whole picture of things to let them help you. So that's been part of my effort is to create this book, but I'm also coaching families through this if they want one-on-one help going through. This is, you know,
Ellie Ledin (48:28.115)
you
Ellie Ledin (48:55.121)
Mm.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (49:05.068)
Like you take a step and things change in the world because you have a heavenly mindset and things look different. And it's just, it's a really fun, I'm super excited right now. It's just in my brain. And so it's on journal pages, but I'm going to get working on it just really soon here. And my daughter's getting married. So that's also taking some of my attention, but I'm really excited about, you know, how I can help families with, with that as well. So.
Ellie Ledin (49:14.045)
Yeah. Yeah.
Ellie Ledin (49:26.405)
Yeah.
Ellie Ledin (49:33.139)
Tell us the name of your book again in case people missed it the first time.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (49:36.556)
yeah, it's Navigating Goodbye, a guide for those blindsided by terminal illness. And the website is Walk the Red, as in Walk the Red Carpet to the Door of Eternity. So walkthered.com, yeah.
Ellie Ledin (49:51.314)
Sure. Wow. Okay.
That seems like an amazing resource, like you said, for the family in the thick of it, for people who care about that family. And that's something we talk about a lot too, is how do you talk to people when this is happening? Because a lot of times people don't know what to say, so they don't say anything, or they say the wrong things or whatever, or they just run away. And so we talk all the time at Inheritance of Hope. We want to be the people who are running towards you.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (50:03.458)
Yeah.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (50:06.797)
Mm-hmm.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (50:14.222)
Absolutely.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (50:19.64)
Mm-hmm.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (50:24.909)
Yeah.
Ellie Ledin (50:26.013)
of the people don't know what to do, they kind of have that freak out moment and they just go the opposite direction. Like, no, we are wanting to come alongside you and help navigate what this journey looks like and that sounds like exactly what you're doing in serving people who are going through something really difficult that you yourself have walked and that you're bringing it into a children's book is just so sweet. I'm excited to like keep my eyes open.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (50:42.498)
Mm-hmm.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (50:53.538)
I'm so excited about it. Yeah. I don't know how long it'll take, but I'm excited about it.
Ellie Ledin (50:56.054)
for it.
Yeah, I didn't know that Brian's legacy video was an hour long. That, I'm sure, is just full of such sweet and heavy and beautiful things. I'm so glad you all have that.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (51:13.42)
Yeah, yeah. He also was writing letters to us that I never knew. And so after he passed, I had to gather his clothes for the funeral parlor, or I guess you do. Do we call it that? The funeral home. And, you know, what was he going to be buried in? And I had to go get clothes. And so I...
Ellie Ledin (51:18.771)
Wow
Ellie Ledin (51:27.237)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (51:35.95)
I was not in the habit of digging through my husband's drawers, but when I did, I lifted up his shirts and underneath were over 180 letters that were written to us. And so he had written me 71 letters and written at least 10 for each of the kids and some for other extended family members and just so precious. It's such a wonderful, wonderful discovery. Like, okay, he's gone, but he's not all gone.
Ellie Ledin (51:44.196)
Ellie Ledin (51:59.389)
my goodness.
Ellie Ledin (52:04.785)
Mm-hmm.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (52:05.182)
And there was a time later that I took over a year to read my 71 letters because I just didn't want to get to the end of them. didn't want there to be, you know, everything's uncovered. But a friend of mine came and she was helping me clean and sort my house. Bless her. She also edited my book. She's an amazing friend. Everyone needs a Lori. She was helping me clean an area and she called me over and she said, Amy, I think I found something that you're going to want to see.
Ellie Ledin (52:12.742)
Yeah.
Ellie Ledin (52:25.171)
you
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (52:34.006)
And there was a stack of little pieces of white paper that were all cut the same size. And he had written different words that were memories of our marriage all the way through. And it gives me goosebumps to think about them. I just wept over them. And they were just such a treasure because I thought I had found everything. And to find more was just really, really cool.
Ellie Ledin (52:45.043)
Mm.
Yeah.
Ellie Ledin (52:58.515)
I got goosebumps as you were telling me that that's so intentional that he spent his time doing that and and caring for you so that you know maybe his physical presence isn't there anymore but that love is always felt. Wow. How would you describe Brian to someone that never met him?
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (53:05.506)
left.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (53:24.642)
He was a long, tall drink of water. was tall and thin and blonde for most of his life. And he loved animals passionately. He loved cows. He was in love with history. He loves all. He's like a Renaissance man. He loved everything creative. He was a woodworker. He was extremely creative. Like there were things that he was fixing things before things would fully break.
Ellie Ledin (53:26.765)
Hahaha
Ellie Ledin (53:41.427)
Hmm.
Ellie Ledin (53:52.925)
Ha ha.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (53:53.176)
Like I would find things, I'd be like, why is this jury rigged like this? Brian must have done this. Like he was always out in the shop doing something. I never really, you know, took full stock of everything he was making and doing. But yeah, he wanted to, there's one moment that really captures him. He decided he wanted to roast his own coffee beans. So he found a source to buy the green beans and he.
Ellie Ledin (53:58.61)
You
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (54:21.356)
bought, he went to, he wouldn't buy things new. He went to a Goodwill and he got some hot air poppers and he had them, he had to do it outside because I don't know if you know but roasting coffee beans is not, it doesn't smell good. You would think it would but it doesn't smell good. So he was outside late at night and we had the string lights on the patio in the back and he's got these air poppers going. He's holding chopsticks because we lived in China and he's using chopsticks to do the stirring and
Ellie Ledin (54:35.727)
really? Yeah.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (54:49.528)
He was doing that while he was reading Anna Karenina on his Kindle. Like, that is my husband. Like, incredible, intellectual, fun, creative. Like, he was the bomb. I loved, love him, still love him. you know, he loved me so well to the point that he would pray with me for my future husband. Like, what? I remember saying.
Ellie Ledin (54:52.722)
my word.
Ellie Ledin (55:03.675)
Hmm.
Yeah.
Ellie Ledin (55:14.394)
Wow.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (55:18.57)
knock it off, like we're here, you know? and then he went and he told each of my kids, when God brings mom somebody else, I want her to marry him. And I want you to know that I'm okay with that.
Ellie Ledin (55:19.728)
Yeah.
Ellie Ledin (55:34.022)
What a blessing. you said earlier, I forget exactly what it was where he kind of spoke this prophetic word over you where, yeah. And so for him to do that.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (55:42.402)
Yeah. Yeah, that we were going to soar. Yeah. He was incredible. And I don't know. Well, I had an interview with another widow, and she gives me hope. She said that her second life partner,
that the marriage was even better than her first marriage because she was older and knew all this stuff about herself and was able to repartner and it be even better, which that gives me lot of inspiration and hope that that can happen. That, you know, nothing has happened. I really expected because Brian prayed that I expected that at the one year mark there was going to be a new husband on a white horse that was going to show up and rescue me from the hard stuff I was in.
Ellie Ledin (56:10.162)
Hmm.
Ellie Ledin (56:18.086)
Yeah.
Ellie Ledin (56:31.826)
you
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (56:32.704)
and he did not show up or maybe did he show up? That was Jesus, you know, that was Jesus on the white horse. Actually, I'm saying that going, wait, you did show up, didn't you? But a human being has not shown up in my life yet and I am okay with that. And I think that's also a real amazing takeaway of my relationship with God is that I don't need another person in my life.
Ellie Ledin (56:36.178)
Yeah.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (56:56.396)
to make me complete, to make me happy. I am fully happy. I am fully satisfied in God. And I was thinking about how profound that is for anyone to be able to say they're satisfied. Because I feel like that's that's that song, right? I can't get no satisfaction, but that's I was eating microwave popcorn a couple of weeks ago and I could not get satisfied. And so I kept eating it and eating it. It just made me sick eventually. Like I never got satisfied, but that is the difference of like
Ellie Ledin (57:08.134)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Ellie Ledin (57:22.298)
Hmm.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (57:26.286)
a walk with Jesus. Like I'm fully satisfied. But I would like to date and marry again at some point. But you know if it doesn't happen I'm okay with that too.
Ellie Ledin (57:30.897)
Hmm.
Yeah. Well, to experience a love like Brian's, sounds like, you know, you probably have really high standards or like this hope because it seemed like, you know, Brian was just this incredible partner for you and a father to your children. yeah. Yeah.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (57:45.494)
Yeah.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (57:51.298)
Yeah, we were.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (57:55.628)
He was amazing.
Ellie Ledin (57:59.994)
Well, we always end every episode by asking whose legacy has impacted you, whether it's how they lived or their death or anything like that. Like, who's been so influential in your life that you carry their legacy on?
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (58:19.438)
You know my answer, don't you? It is Brian. Yes, I would definitely say Brian. I've had some really amazing women friends who are older than me that have set some really clear pathways for me. But if I am quantifying it, hands down was Brian because he loved me in ways that I didn't love myself. And he taught me what the love of Jesus really looks like.
Ellie Ledin (58:20.594)
I'm going to take a guess.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (58:49.196)
And yeah, the way he left legacy and the way he handled scary things. know, one of his, I mentioned that he said all the time about like, how can this really be and is my life ever gonna go back? But the other thing he had, he was saying on repeat is, I just want God to be glorified. I just want God to be glorified during those first days. And so I think that he absolutely is the legacy that impacts me on a daily basis.
Ellie Ledin (59:18.96)
Yeah, even as you just shared your story today, feel like we barely scratched the surface. I feel like we barely even talked about inheritance of hope. So maybe I'm a bad podcast host for not talking about it too much, but it feels like there's just so many stories that we could unpack and that just, I think, shows how...
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (59:30.554)
I'm sorry.
Ellie Ledin (59:40.124)
big of a life you two had together and that the life you're still living is so infused with Brian's love that it is, yeah, kind of changing the world one book at a time, one conversation at a time.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (59:49.763)
Yeah.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (59:57.816)
Well, and I will say that Inheritance of Hope really helped focus us on legacy. Like we really, think because I remember he didn't want to do a legacy video. That put him, he was an introvert and that put him on the spot and turns out he could talk for a whole hour. He could monologue for a whole hour. He didn't know it. But he resisted that. remember he...
Ellie Ledin (01:00:15.858)
You
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (01:00:22.336)
he wasn't looking forward to going on our retreat because he thought it would be depressing being around all these people that had terminal illness. And it ended up being the absolute opposite. And then it was such, mean, American, I don't know why I'm saying that. Inheritance of hope has been so key in all of my older children's lives because my older daughters have gone and served and been on retreats. you know, I've helped with hope at home groups and, you know,
Ellie Ledin (01:00:27.026)
Mm.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (01:00:52.234)
Inheritance of Hope is woven into our family's unlike any other nonprofit out there. So it has absolutely been critical in, I think, in taking what we already had going and blending together and creating the story that we have was definitely Inheritance of Hope. And I recommend it all the time to families. And like, you need to go see these people. They're amazing. And get involved.
Ellie Ledin (01:00:58.674)
Mm.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (01:01:20.738)
and that things are free. I still find it amazing that your legacy videos are free. And I said that in my book, like, I don't know how long until they say, we need to be charging for this. But it's an amazing gift. And I went and recorded a legacy video because I thought that's what we need to be doing. need to, you know, as we're in the middle of life, take a pause, go record a video so that your loved ones have something of you. Even if, you know, and I think she told me you can do multiple, multiple videos if you want.
Ellie Ledin (01:01:28.663)
Yeah.
Hmm.
Ellie Ledin (01:01:44.965)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (01:01:50.37)
but just giving people who love you something. So I thank Inheritance of Hope. And I love that you're doing a podcast because you know, just gonna get more people to think about things. I think Americans don't think about death often. We don't wanna talk about that. We don't wanna think about it. And hopefully, you know, I think we have that perspective that'll never happen to me. And then it does. And then hopefully people have heard of you and they come and just receive.
Ellie Ledin (01:01:54.332)
Yeah.
Ellie Ledin (01:02:11.078)
Mm-hmm.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (01:02:18.006)
the multitude of blessings that inheritance of hope brings.
Ellie Ledin (01:02:22.354)
Yeah. Well, I echo everything you just said. It's a wonderful organization and I think more people should know about it. So thank you for being such a big part of what makes Inheritance of Hope the wonderful organization it is. And thank you for spending some time with me today. I know people will be really touched by your story.
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (01:02:26.848)
and
Amy Shaw, Walk The Red (01:02:46.68)
Great. Well, thank you. Thank you, Ellie. You're so sweet. It's been good to know you.
