but be prepared, it might be the longest intro yet. It starts with my story before ever picking up a camera. For ten years I worked on my booked, Beauty Restored: Finding Life and Hope After Date Rape. It was based on my own experience of being a victim of date rape while attending a Christian unversity. At the time there were no books available on the Christian market for the topic, so I started writing my experience. I think it was an act of hope that I would somehow recover and if I ever did my process of recovery would maybe help someone else know they weren't alone.
After seven years of writing it and rewriting it, then losing it when my hard drive crashed and writing it all over again...it was finallly accepted by a publisher. My husband and I were also expecting our first baby. We had decided to name her Pascaline Josette Tausend. Pascaline because of the link to passover and feeling like God had passed us over in His mercy. Josette meaning God will increase and Tausend (our last name) meaning a thousand fold in German.
She was two weeks late but it was perfect timing. As I went into labor, I was told that my book was being released in stores and in God's sense of humor I birthed two babies that day.When Pascaline was three months old, we hit the road and in two years did over 40 National TV shows, radio interviews and speaking engagements all over the U.S. and Canada. At the end of the two years, I was pregnant with our second doing a speaking engagement in TN. The last day I started having abnormal pains and came home right away.
Within the next few days, we were told that our baby wasn't making it. And by the end of the week, our baby Aidan's heart beat was gone.
My heart was tired. I stopped speaking and found refuge in Brian and Pascaline. I couldn't even write because it brought me to a connection with God that my heart couldn't handle. It was during those dark months that I picked up a camera and started shooting Pascaline.
I couldn't help but feel like Aidan, our little fire, had only been in our life for a moment, and that moment had changed both our lives forever. The single moment of life held such weight to me that I found myself wanting to capture Pascaline's moments; moments of joy while playing with a balloon for the first time, moments of dancing, crying or just waking up from a nap.
Other people started noticing the photos and asked me to shoot their families. And their families turned into weddings. I had gone from speaking to 800 women and sharing my story, to hiding behind a camera. When I asked Brian if it was okay, he smiled and said, "I think God's healing you behind the camera Me Ra. And I think He's okay with you letting go of your story and capturing other people's stories."
I think Brian's right (he usually is
. In just three in a half years, our business has taken off faster than I can imagine. I've never gone to school for photography but find the creativity in photography parallels writing. And then I've been blessed to be trained and challenged by some of the best, like Bambi Cantrell and Denis Reggie.We've been so busy that we recently made the SCARY move and bumped our packages from $5K to $10K, and then last week we got a call from Grace Ormonde to be one of their exclusive advertised photographers. Unreal to me. We also had a chunky baby boy 15 months ago and named him Blaze. Blaze because of how God's glory seems to blaze in our life when we feel broken and empty.
Photography has been the vehicle that keeps Aidan close to me though he's so far away. Every time we shoot a wedding I see these moments; the moment a bride rests in her groom's arm when no one is looking and you know she is trusting him and risking her heart with this person. Capturing those moments, the moments that matter most, keeps Aidan close to me.
I had a bride call me last week. I'm scheduled to shoot her wedding in Oct. She had called the wedding off. I asked a couple questions and she started to cry on the phone saying that they had such huge issues in their past, how could they ever make it. I told her she needed to come over for dinner and hear another story to make her feel a little better about her own.
She hadn't told her fiance whose house they were going to. I wish I had the photo of how thrown off he was when they showed up at their "wedding photographers" house.
We spent five hours together that night, sharing our stories with them, laughing together, crying and laughing some more. When Brian and I went to bed that night, I told him I was amazed that even though we're not in the ministry anymore, God still knows our door is open and somehow people find their way here.
If your still reading, I have to add that if my writing sounds like we have it all together or have found the answers, I've done a poor job at communciating. I think life and it's storms have humbled Brian and I. We don't have nearly as many answers, if any, as we once thought we did. And I don't know if we'll ever be fully healed from losses we've endured. But somehow as deep as the pain goes, so goes the joy.
Thanks for hearing my "introduction of myself". Now to just click the Post button...
Warmly, Me Ra
