About 2 weeks after returning home from Ukraine, I had finished up all my photos, organizing and editing and was quite content with the work.  Photos from Peru, the Netherlands, Ukraine and England.  Well over 10,000 photos.

The weekend after I came home, I had photographed a wedding.  It was so refreshing to be behind the camera in that capacity again.  As I was downloading the pictures onto my external hard drive, I left it plugged in over night (perhaps that’s a problem).  Because when I woke up, my hard drive was not appearing on my computer.  The light was flashing and you could hear it spinning, but there was no sign of the drive being connected to the computer.  All the photos I had spent countless hours on were suddenly gone. [at least the wedding photos were still on the card!]  I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, I had just taken a once in a life-time trip, and I have no photos to show for it.  That’s a bummer for anyone, but for a photographer it’s a tragedy.

I began to be extremely frustrated, but in some miraculous way I had a peace.  Truly unexplainable.  I shared my story with friends and with my small group of high school kids, and asked them to pray for my hard drive [i’m always the one that’s skeptical about the “pray for my dog/hampster requests” but the hard drive seemed really important to me], I really wanted a miracle.

3 days later, I was at work, and saw an external hard drive sitting on my desk.  Out of curiosity, I plugged it in and to my amazement, I discovered that 2 weeks before I had backed up all the Peru Photos to that very hard drive.  I got my miracle!  

The girls asked me in the weeks following if I was able to get my pictures back and I love that in this case i can say “yay God”, but I’d like to hope that even if I didn’t get them back, I could embrace that the photos are engraved on my heart, and sometimes living the life is more valuable than hoarding the picture.

Perhaps that’s the lesson I need to learn in this all.  A lesson I find I learn weekly.  Participate in life.

“Standing on the fringes of life offers a unique experience, but there’s a time to see what it looks like from the dance floor.”
― Chbosky

As for now, the hard drive still doesn’t work, and I lost about 800 photos and some videos  from teaching a wedding photography master classes in  Zytomer, but the outcome could have been terrible.  Now it’s just sad.  (I am still attempting to run recovery software and perhaps, I will get another miracle!)

There’s really times when all we can do is hope that situations work out, i think that’s called trust.  😉

Has there been a time when you’ve needed to let go of something really important to you, because of a situation that was outside of your control?  How did you respond?