There is something that we really have not been able to go a day without thinking about… and TODAY is the day that we are going to share it with all of you! So excited to be launching something AMAZING, crazy, exciting, and hopefully life changing for so many! TODAY at 12:00 p.m.! Don’t miss it here on the blog!!
Dreaming, Our Dreams //
We interrupt the regularly (or irregularly, lately) scheduled program for this special news bulletin about Liz and Ryan! :)… First, we just have to apologize for the irregular part! We are learning a lot about travel and working and how wifi is not as regularly available as we had become used to in the comfort of home! Thank you for learning along with us and being patient as we get ourselves together! ;)
And now onto the new bulletin! ;)
Happy Tuesday friends! Over the past few weeks Liz and I have been discussing ways we can make our blog more useful to everyone who visits! As we have written about before, our passion is to help people live a more AMAZING life and have more AMAZING marriages! In addition, we love being able to document these AMAZING moments in peoples lives through our photography. In order to best serve you, our readers and friends, we have decided to develop a little plan that will (hopefully ;) ) create some consistency on our blog and make it a more enjoyable experience for you!
On Mondays, we are excited to start sharing posts with a theme of “AMAZING marriages.” In the AMAZING marriage posts, we will share experiences, both personal and from other couples that have taught us how to always choose love first to make our marriage amazing each and everyday!
Wednesdays will now be featuring posts about living an AMAZING life. Each day we are given is a gift and it should be celebrated! Life can be tough and we recognize that. Through the everyday stresses of life, we recognize that we always have the opportunity to choose happiness. Our good friend, Lauren Wakefield, summed it up best. “Sh*t happens, but we are still going to eat cupcakes!” The posts we share on Wednesdays will include things we do to make everyday moments just a little more AMAZING! Wednesdays will also be the days that include some of our favorite topics (Ryan Cooks, Liz’s DIY) and our AMAZING Life Manifesto videos too!
Friday is still a work in progress! One thing is for sure, we hope that after reading our Friday posts that you are inspired to have an AMAZING weekend. A few of the ideas we are currently hoping to include are recipes for Breakfast in Bed, Friday Favorites, the Liz and Ryan Book Club, ways to make Love and Service your way of life, and how to make big dreams happen.
Tuesdays and Thursdays will be dedicated to photography. We will be sharing our work from our most recent sessions on these days! I am also a little bit of a tech nerd, and as long as Liz lets me ( ;) ), I hope to start sharing a little bit more of my technical side and why I love photography!
We plan to consistently post every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 9:00 a.m EST. Our goal is also to post Tuesday and Thursday posts at 9:00 a.m. EST, but depending on how crazy the wedding season gets, you may have to forgive us a bit!
Can you tell we are Type A people?!? ;) We felt like we needed to create and share this little scheduled plan for all of our other Type A friends out there! ;) One of our favorite bloggers, Chris Guillebeau is always SO CONSISTENT with his blogging- and knowing that he will be posting on Monday and Thursdays definitely gets us even more excited for those days! We can only hope that you all will share that same excitement for our new and improved plan! ;)
As we begin to implement these changes, we would LOVE to hear from you all and what you would like to read about! If you have any ideas for posts, want to share ways you live an AMAZING marriage or AMAZING life, or would be interested in being featured as a guest blog post let us know! Either leave us a comment below or send us an email at hello@lizandryan.com. We can’t wait to hear from you! Thanks so much for reading! You all rock!
Dreaming, Life Chats //
Through life-changing conversations (on a bus, over dinner in Dallas, on a floor at 3:00 a.m. in the Dominican Republic, you name the crazy location…. we probably had an AMAZING life chat there), listening to Mary share her heart about fear (and so much more) 10 times with the What’s Next Tour, attending the What If Conference, reading, and a whole lot of self reflection… we have had an AMAZING amount of clarity over the past few weeks!
When we first started our photography business and photographed our first wedding, we thought we were doing it because we LOVED taking photos and we LOVED being with couples on that crazy beautiful day of their lives. That is definitely true, but we realized a few years into it that there was a deeper meaning. (What Justin and Mary Marantz call “The Why.”) We were first introduced to this during the Spread The Love tour in San Francisco in 2011. At the time, we may have had an idea of what that Why was… but we were definitely not in a place to realize it. Over the past 2 years, we have grown a lot. Through conversations between Ryan and I… and then eventually close friends… we realized and were able to finally vocalize the real reason we are so incredibly passionate about what we do. It wasn’t until we sat on that bus on the last day of the tour and then again on the floor at 3:00 a.m. in the DR that I realized it was time to share that why.
7 1/2 years ago…
It was a warmer than usual fall day on campus at Bucknell. I had just completed an exam… where I remember feeling distracted. My head was not in it and I could feel in my gut that something was wrong. As soon as I got out of class and began my walk across campus to work in the Dean of Students Office, I received a call from my dad. He was a wreck. He could barely get words out. Immediately the tears began to flow from my eyes when I realized what was going on. Eventually, the words came out… “Your mom left. There is a note on the table that she is leaving and not coming back.”
As much as I didn’t want to believe it… I knew it was true. In the weeks leading up to my parents 25th wedding anniversary (just a few weeks before this fall day), something was different. The normal “best friend” relationship I had with my mom was distant. I had this feeling that something was going on… but I was the only one in our family to see it. I confronted my mom about it and she assured me that everything was fine. Obviously, it wasn’t.
That morning, with a hand-written note on the table, and no further communication with anyone, she walked out.
I remember making my way over to the Rooke Chapel on campus. I obviously was not in a state to go to work… and I just needed a place that was safe. I sat on the steps of the Chapel and just sobbed. As Ryan rubbed my shoulders and held me tight, the pain, anger, and frustration came out with every tear (pretty much like a waterfall! ;) ). Everything that I knew of marriage was just gone. Deleted… eliminated… stomped on. Divorce was always something that “happened to other families”… not mine. I was crushed in more ways than one!
It was hard. That experience of heartbreak was like nothing we had ever experienced before… and hope to never experience again. The past 7 1/2 years have been full of learning to forgive, building trust, and loving like no other! Although things are not always “picture perfect,” we are confident now more than ever that this was all part of God’s plan. He certainly does work in mysterious ways, but the clarity we have received (especially recently) has made us more grateful than ever!
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At the What If conference, we received some really honest feedback… criticism out of love if you will… That feedback came from a few people who said they just didn’t think we were sharing an authentic story on our blog. They felt like we were putting out this AMAZINGly happy message, but we were not having the impact that we could because we were not able to connect with people on a deeper level. The reality is, it wasn’t like we were trying to hide anything, we just have not been ready to share our story. There was a heck of a lot of personal processing- not to mention, a hard, but incredibly heartfelt and needed, conversation with my mom- that had to happen before I was in a place to fully recognize and share that the horribly dark time in our lives was actually the reason behind our passion! Let’s just say, it took me awhile to finally get to the point of actually saying Thank You to my parents for what they went through. Although crazy hard and a lot of hurt involved, we are grateful. (Honestly, that is still kind of hard to actually realize… but ohh so AMAZING!) I am excited to say… my mom and I had that conversation last week! ;) And it was more freeing than I ever could have imagined! (I think for both of us!)
“Without suffering, we do not have the opportunity to cultivate compassion and understanding; and without understanding, there can be no true love…Happiness is a function of compassion. If you do not have compassion in your heart, you do not have any happiness.” –Thich Nhat Hanh
Going through my parent’s divorce is the reason Ryan and I don’t see ourselves as “just” photographers, but as a couple in love who has a mission to help people recognize the love that they have in their lives is something incredibly special… and even though there are going to be hard times, choosing to live with joyful happiness, unconditional love, and authentic gratitude is the only way to fully live! We have realized that the experiences we have gone through in our lives (especially the hardest ones) and the love that we share has become incredible motivation and has sparked an AMAZING passion in our hearts! We are confident it is all a part of God’s plan and it is now our responsibility to do something with it!
Last week we created The AMAZING Marriage Project. (Does everything make even more sense now?!?! ;) ) By studying, documenting, and sharing what makes the most AMAZING marriages work, we want to touch the lives of all couples! We have this crazy goal in our hearts of taking the divorce rate from 50% to 0%. CRAZY and Stupid (as our friend Richie would say in his new AMAZING book –The Power of Starting Something Stupid– that you all have to read… comes out March 5th, but you can pre-order here!), but the reality is that we can try. By sharing love, we do believe we have the ability to touch the lives of others one at a time… and if we can inspire just one person/couple who inspires another person/couple who inspires another person/couple… to choose joyful happiness, unconditional love, and authentic gratitude as their way of life, we might be on to something! You never know until you try! ;)
Thank you for letting us pour our hearts out on this blog and being there to help us navigate this incredibly AMAZING journey through life. Most especially to my Mom, Dad, and Brother (as well as the rest of our family and friends who have been a part of these past 7 1/2 years+) THANK YOU for EVERYTHING! We are so grateful for your listening ears, positive hearts, and incredible love!
Dreaming, Our Dreams //
What if? It’s often a question we ask ourselves but not one we normally take very seriously. That is until we attended the What If conference this past week in the Dominican Republic.
How often do you ask yourself what if on a daily basis? What if I didn’t have to go to work in this job I don’t like. What if we stopped worrying about what everyone else thinks of our idea? What if we had more time?
For just this moment, stop worrying about what could be done and actually go do it. Turn those What Ifs into action. Make all your dreams a reality.
We will be sharing a lot more about our experience during the What If conference throughout this week but for now we wanted to share just a few of our What Ifs. One of the biggest What Ifs and amazing life lessons we learned was What If we let ourselves be more vulnerable? So with that said, we are going to be a little vulnerable and share some of our What Ifs and not worry about if you think they are crazy or stupid. Because if they sound crazy and stupid, then we must be doing something right! :) And if any of our What Ifs resonate with you, be sure to let us know, we’d love your support!
What If we lived to give in every single thing that we do. In every single interaction we have. What if we shared ourselves with everyone with such amazing love everyday and not just in the hardest and darkest times of need?
What if we started an AMAZING marriage project to photograph 15 – 25 happily married couples. What if we did it for free? What if we had people nominate their favorite couples? What if we documented it in such a way that we could learn the secrets of an AMAZING marriage and then passed it along to world?
What if we woke up and chose happiness everyday? Not because it was easy, but because if was a better alternative to worry, fear, and anger? What if we saw the positive in every single moment, through divorce, addiction, cancer, and death? What if no matter what, at the end of the day, we still choose to eat cupcakes? What if we shared this idea, and inspired people to approach life with a similar mindset to the world?
What if we could help make a marriage that was ok… AMAZING, a marriage that was flat and stale… energetic and full of love? What if we could make our marriage more AMAZING by helping others? What if we created an escape for couples to let go of the everyday stresses of life, and work, to focus on what makes their marriage AMAZING? What if we created and hosted the escape this year? What if we didn’t worry about if people would sign up? What if we didn’t worry about if we would make a profit? What if this could keep just one marriage from ending in divorce? Wouldn’t it be worth it? Wouldn’t it be our responsibility?
What if we put it all out there the moment we got home? Oh wait, we just did. :)
Amazing Life Manifesto, Dreaming //
It has been a bit crazy over the past few weeks. As much as we love love love traveling, it has left us feeling quite disconnected. Don’t get us wrong; disconnecting can be a very good thing!!! However, when it leaves us scrambling to put up blog posts because of lack of Internet connection, it has us definitely appreciating the interwebs when we do have them! ;) Thanks so much for being so patient with us and understanding when we have been a little less than consistent on getting our blog posts up! ;)
Today, for our delayed AMAZING Life Manifesto post, we wanted to share a little inspiration that we have been reminding ourselves over and over the past few weeks! Document Your Journey! It is so easy, especially as photographers (which is ironic, right?), to forget to take the time to capture our own personal moments. Sometimes carrying the camera around with us is just a hassle or other times we feel bad asking people to stop for a moment and capture a moment in time for us. But those excuses are just excuses, my friends! Crazy excuses that actually rob us of our own memories that we so want to remember!!!
Over the past few weeks, we have been all over the place and our minds have been trying desperately to keep up- but reality is, we cannot remember everything! Through this experience we have gained an even greater appreciation for taking the time to capture this very moment and document our journey along the way! Our cameras have been in our hands over the past few weeks and we have definitely been capturing the sites and sounds of our travels! We have so much to share with you all… but in the meantime (as we wrap our minds around everything), we thought we would share with you a very special video that our friend Jeremy (of Jeremy Mitchell Cinema) put together to help all of us remember the incredible journey that was the What’s Next Tour! Watching this video brings out so many emotions and is the perfect way of remembering this crazy journey we were just on! We are so excited and truly grateful for this gift and special documentation of our journey! Thanks Jeremy!!! And after watching this awesome video, be sure to check out our Instagram feed and hashtag #whatsnextcrew to see more of our fun adventures!