Fulton County’s Shaw Family Turns Adversity Into Huge Blessings

By: Tim Kays

Brian and Amy Shaw have what could be considered a ‘mustard seed’ marriage. As described in Matthew 13:32, “Though it is the smallest of all seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds come and perch in its branches.”

“We had three children,” Amy recalled. “I was pregnant again and we had a child that was born still right after Christmas. This year, it’ll be 14 years. A while later, we had our fourth live baby. We realized that we were a family who lost a child, and that we could be a family for children who lost their families, so we began adopting children from around the world.”

Adopt they did, and more than once. “Unofficially,” Amy said, “…we have 11, but we have 10 that all have our names. We kind of unofficially adopted an older, well, I guess he’s an adult. He’s 22. We brought him into our family, but he did not take our name.”

So recapping this mustard seed analogy…in the beginning, there was Brian and Amy. Then came the biological kids. After that came the special needs kids from around the world making it Brian and Amy…and Jensi, Anneli, Esty, Oliver, Zareb, Darrah Kate, Toby, Gable, Winnie Grace, Summerlin, and the newest addition, Joshua Bloss.

With a family size that would put the Brady Bunch to shame, the Shaw family didn’t just grow in size like the mustard seed, but it grew exponentially close in love and a familial spirit and energy like no other.

That love and energy has gotten them through the COVID quarantine, and was tested even further when Brian was diagnosed with glioblastoma, a very aggressive, terminal brain cancer. Most families would have collapsed like wet cardboard under this level of adversity. As you can see by the picture however, the Shaws aren’t like most families.

At the center of this tightly woven family is the very glue that strengthens and holds their bonds of love firmly in place…their shared faith in Jesus Christ, which makes for another mustard seed analogy.

They live by the mustard seed found in Matthew 17:20, where Christ said, “Truly I tell you, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.” It was that faith that set off an unlikely chain of events that led to the formation of a ministry fundraiser.

As if the family didn’t have enough on its collective plate, they were about to enthusiastically embark on a huge project for a mission to help refugees living in Toledo. Getting to that point would entail, amongst other things, setting up a crowd funding account, promoting it with a YouTube family video production like no other…and the faith of a mustard seed.

To many, the story of the fundraiser sounds like farcical fiction of the first order, but if you follow it through from beginning to end, you can see that there is something more to the picture than just happenstance. It all begins with a complete stranger that drove past the Shaw house every day on his way to and from work.

The man stopped one day, and informed Brian that the Lord spoke to him, and told him to stop and give the family a certain amount of money per Shaw child. He asked how many kids were in the family, and gave Brian and Amy the aforementioned money for the ten kids…plus another $200 to give to someone else in need. “He had no idea he was going to be giving so much,” Amy recalled. So a blessing out of nowhere came with a ‘To be continued’ attached in the form of $200 to be disbursed. But how, where and to whom?

“We as a family took about three different family dinner times to talk about where do we want to make this donation,” Amy said. “We finally chose where we wanted to, and we did a bunch of research to decide because there are a lot of really great places.”

We’ve actually done some donation and volunteering with this organization in Toledo before, so we just kind of wanted to keep up with them. But it was really Jensi’s idea to make this go much further. And she came up with this bold idea one day and told me and I was like, ‘Ahh! We should do it!’”
“We are a Christian family,” Jensi said, “…and so the Bible is really important to us. And there’s a Bible story that’s in multiple places in the Gospels where Jesus is sitting before 5,000 people and they’re all hungry, and they all need to eat.”

“And there’s this little boy who brings forth five loaves and two fish. Jesus told His disciples to go and feed them, and they’re like, ‘What? How can we feed them?’ And this little boy came up and offered his tiny little lunch. And we were just trying to think about where we could give this money. I mean, we know that $200 in our family, it’s maybe like a meal out. And so I was thinking we could probably make this a really, really big impact.”

“And you know, the Lord started working in my heart, and then I shared the idea with the family, and all the kids were just like, ‘Oh, my gosh, yes…let’s do it!’ It was definitely inspired by the Lord, but then the whole family just grasped on to it and so it went from there.”

“Jensi did all the hard work,” Amy said. “This whole video was her brainstorm. She had written out all the parts and all the lines for all the different people. And we have photography equipment because we’ve had a photography business, and so my husband set up all the lights and all of that, and she directed this whole thing. It took us like all day on a Saturday to shoot it, but this kiddo spent all of her time editing. And so, by Sunday afternoon, she showed us the final one. We were like, ‘WOW!’”

With a goal to turn the $200 into $20,000, the project took flight. “It was November 28 when we filmed it,” Amy recalled. “We’d been brainstorming for maybe two weeks, and then we posted it that next Wednesday.” “It was the day after Giving Tuesday, December 2, when we posted the video. It really was just on our social medias. That’s what we did on mine, and then Jensi’s and then Anneli’s. Then I think Brian shared it.”

Long story short…the word was out, and like what Paul described in I Corinthians 3:6, the stranger planted the seed, the Shaw family watered it, and God provided a huge increase in very short order. Two weeks after the video hit the internet, the $20,000 goal was hit, then exceeded. “I have raised a lot of money to bring our kids home from their different countries and orphanages,” Amy said.

“I’ve had to raise over $200,000. God did it, but we did all the legwork. I’ve never raised money that quickly. That was really neat. It was just really inspiring for us to watch people jump in, and it was the day after Giving Tuesday too. That was really significant to us that people probably gave for Giving Tuesday, and then they still gave for this. It was just really sweet.”

“We know of several families that the children and gave up their all the money that they had in their savings. And then there was another family that two of their children chose to give up all the money that they would have had for Christmas gifts from their parents. That was really sweet.”

The Shaw family is going to be giving the proceeds of their fundraiser to a Toledo-based organization called Social Services for the Arab Community (SSFAC). SSAFC is a 501(C)3 non-profit organization that serves low income, limited English speaking Arab immigrant and refugee families in the Greater Toledo Area in helping them achieve self-sufficiency and becoming contributing members of the community.

What led the Shaws to SSFAC? “They do some amazing work,” Amy said. “We were actually able to give Thanksgiving meals to two families from Ethiopia. There’s two families actually, that we are giving towards, and we don’t know their names.”

“They’re refugees. They’re political refugees and very afraid of anything that would get them in trouble. They were from Beirut and their homes were destroyed in that explosion, but there was also a bunch of political stuff going on.”

Using assumed names to protect the identities of the recipients, Jensi described the families who will be receiving the fruits of the Shaw fundraiser. “The first family is the Shihab family,” she said.

“They have three kids. The mom was a pharmacist, and the dad had a butcher business back in Lebanon. Unfortunately all of their bank accounts, and everybody’s bank accounts in Lebanon are locked because of a terrorist group, so even though they are highly qualified to work, they have no way to access their money, and they can’t get jobs.”

“The second family is the Khalil family,” Amy said. “They have six children. The youngest is a little boy in a wheelchair who needs daily injections and daily medications.”

“All the GoFundMe money went to the ministry,” Amy said, “…and the ministry is going to use that to buy specific gift cards for the families, so they’re not just handing them a check. So they’re going to go ahead and pay their rent ahead for them.”

“One of the families was already behind in rent, and they’re going to take care of that, then give them different gift cards for groceries and clothing and the things that that they’re going to need. They invited us to go down on that day and meet the families, so we’re really looking forward to that. Now we have a countdown to how many days until we get to meet these families.”

“People have really rallied around our family,” Amy said. “And that’s what we referred to frequently in the video. Several of the kids said stuff. That’s what we’ve been facing for two and a half years now. He’s just come through his second brain surgery the last day of September, September 30, and that was a pretty big miracle in itself.”

“We had so many people praying for him around the world. In fact, I think I counted like 18 countries where people were praying for him, and he came through. He had an awake craniotomy, where he had to talk during it, so they didn’t damage his speech. And when you saw him on the video, he talks a little bit slow, but I would say he’s functioning at 95%, which is despite the disease and the daily chemotherapy.”

So, the fundraising goals met, what is next for the Shaw family? “I’ve been telling people that at least my future is one big question mark, because I just don’t know,” Jensi said. It depends on where the Lord leads me, and I know I can speak that for my family too. We don’t know where He’s going to call us next, But wherever He does…” “We keep praying for a house on the beach,” Amy said.”

“My husband has an MRI the beginning of January, so that’ll tell us a lot about which direction we’re heading for the next year. Being in COVID, and having the brain cancer, and we’ve got six kids with special needs. We don’t want them to get COVID because we don’t know how that would mix with their special needs and some of their medical history. COVID and cancer together has really kind of grounded us into our own little bubble. I don’t have a good answer for you.”

Except for Jensi’s…’where the Lord leads.’

“That’s right. Yeah, right. I mean, that’s really the truth,” Jensi and Amy both said. “We didn’t even see this coming,” Amy added. “Yeah, this kind of just happened, spur of the moment,” Jensi said. “What I thought was amazing was that, I mean, it was $20,000. But you know, I’m in college right now, so anytime I think of a big number, I’m always multiplying that by how much I spent on my car.”

“Like, you know, I could buy four cars for $20,000. So it’s just a lot of money to me, and we were just talking about how much we need for these families, and how much would it cost to take care of them for a month or whatever.”

“We had been talking about trying to multiply this out, but it hadn’t hit us; we hadn’t kind of decided on a specific goal. I was doing my devotions one morning, just praying about it and multiplying it out, and realizing like, okay, $15,000 would take care of them for, you know, approximately x-amount of months.”

“And then, I can’t describe this other than the Lord just gave me this – like brainstorms – like what if we multiply this $200 100 times? And that $20,000 written there in my journal looked like a huge number. And again, I’m just thinking like, ‘Oh, my gosh, you could buy cars with that.’ But I was just, ‘Okay, Lord, if this is the idea that You’re giving us, then we’ll just see where this goes. I’m putting it in Your hands.’

“And I mean, it’s so true. We put out the video and we barely touched it. I mean, we shared a couple updates and stuff, but the Lord took it and just went off with it. And, you know, the entire family was excited about that goal. And people were just really, really amazing.”  “In fact,” Amy added, “…we had kind of made plans, like if it slowed down.

There was a big influx of money in the beginning, and Jensi and I talked like, ‘Okay, so maybe it’s a good plan to kind of pump life into this, and when it when it dies down to maybe make a phone call to the original man who gave us this money, and let him know what had happened.

He had said, ‘I’d never heard God speak in that way, so specific like, ‘Stop by this house and give them X-amount of dollars per kid.’ And, you know, he did it, and my husband wanted me to meet him. I was busy cooking dinner for all these people, and I came out and he was like, ‘I’ve never done something like this.’ I was telling him, ‘I am so excited for you, because when you obey God’s voice, and you’re scared but you do it anyway, like the blessings are going to just bowl you over.’

‘Really I had no idea what that would be. I figured that God would bless this man and his life, and maybe He has. I have no idea, but I’m excited to finally make the phone call and say, ‘Hey, guess what? We never ended up needing that little boost, because this fundraiser just totally did itself.’”

“Truly I tell you, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.” The Shaw family is the living embodiment of that proclamation, and neither cancer or COVID can persuade them otherwise.

Tim can be reached at tim@thevillagereporter.com