And on another note, I had a HUGE helping hand from God on Sunday.  We had a wedding two weekends ago–because of Brayden’s birthday being last week and planning for his party, I didn’t get a chance to look through the images.  So I uploaded the images from the memory cards on my external hard drive and then backed them up on a second one.  I had to format (delete) all the cards for another wedding we had this past Saturday.  As I normally do, I uploaded the pictures from that wedding the next day just so that they are safe on the hard drive.  I finally started looking through the images of the first wedding.  As I was looking through them, I realized that there were missing images.  Pictures of the groomsmen getting ready, some of the ceremony, and some of the pictures of the wedding party and bride and groom outside–almost 300 pictures.

My heart sank.  My stomach churned.

Once a memory card is cleared, files are wiped out.  And then I shot a whole OTHER wedding on all the cards, completely writing over anything that would have remained.  I must have missed a card when I uploaded all the wedding images on the computer.  And if I missed it in the first place, even if I backed up all the files that I had uploaded, those pictures wouldn’t be on either hard drive.

I almost threw up.  And then I prayed for about three hours straight.

I put a couple of memory cards through rescuepro, but all files were wiped out once a card is formatted and then more images are written over the cards again.

I lined up my memory cards in order, just to be sure that I had them all and one of them didn’t get left out when I uploaded pictures.  I threw in the towel and gave up.  And then I freaked out and decided that I couldn’t breathe unless I cleaned off my desk right that moment.  I was suffocating.

I picked up a pile of junk to clean it out, and one of the memory cards that I had lined up (the one at the end) must have been on the junk I picked up, because it fell from the pile and onto the desk in front of me.  It was one that I hadn’t run through rescuepro yet–and it was one of those weird moments–like, wow, this card just fell from this pile ironically–what if it’s the one.  What if God just made this card fall so I would see it and try it.  Does God even work that way?


I put the card in the slot, and came back into the room ten minutes later after the card had been scanned.

And then I cried.

I have fourteen memory cards.  Some are 8 gig, some are 4, some are 2.  Usually in weddings, we start with the big ones and leave the smaller ones for the end.  There were only two cards that I didn’t use for the second wedding.

This was one of them.  I didn’t know it until I ran the scan.

The memory card had been formatted, but no new files were written over the deleted files, since we didn’t use the card at the second wedding.  ALL of the missing files that I needed were staring me in the face.

Wow, God.  


I was actually using a trial version of the recovery program–so I had to pay $40 to buy the program in order to be able to save the files.  But to me, it was worth every dollar.

And that is how God answered my prayers in my time of need on Sunday.  Isn’t that amazing?  To you, it might not seem like a big deal–but to me, I felt like it was the end of my world–losing someone’s wedding pictures?  Yikes.

So, again I will say it.  Wow, God.