Meet Trailblazer Terasha Burrell

Today we’d like to introduce you to Terasha Burrell.

So, before we jump into specific questions about the business, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
If you asked me at ages 3, 23, and now, 33 what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would tell you a writer. I never had the dreams of anything else. I loved to read. Books were my escape from the sometimes troublesome and hard to understand the world to a little girl, therefore reading allowed me to go into a world where the stories weren’t always perfect but somehow had a happy ending to them.

I have the typical raised in the church, went to college, lived abroad (although that’s not typical to anyone in my family) and now just trying my best to be an adult story. When I was a teenager, I took a trip with my church’s youth group to Atlanta. As a girl from small-town Alabama, Atlanta was the big city and I made up in my mind that I would call it my home someday. After an amazing detour to living in Italy in 2012, I was finally fortunate enough to move here in 2013.

The last six years of living in this city have been filled with so much joy, lessons learned, setbacks, and come ups. For a small-town girl, I had made something of myself. Not everything was perfect, nor has that ever been the goal, but life was good.

That changed in 2017 when I walked through a very painful season. We all have plans for our life, and we live life according to this formula that if we do X then Y will happen. This formula works most of the time. Even as a Christian, I think I bought into the formula that my faith plus my works would equal a good life or desirable outcome. This was true until I was standing on the side of an equation heartbroken from a breakup, fighting a legal battle because someone decided to steal my identity, a health scare, and a myriad of other things that left me so broken and lonely. In a matter of months, the life I had so intentionally built crumbled. Feeling so hopeless, depression set it and it got very dark for a very long time.

I had so many questions. I had played the game right. I had checked all the boxes. Where was my happy ending to the story? What had I done so wrong? I wrestled with so many questions as I cried in coffee shops all over Atlanta with the few close friends that were kind enough to get in the pit with me.

Every morning became a fight to face the day and every night I laid my head on a tear-soaked pillow when I wasn’t sleeping in my prayer closet. People had all the practical suggestions about how to make it through. Because people knew me as the writer, I was told constantly to just write my way through it. Desperate to find hope, I tried but the words would not come. Every time I would sit down to even journal, I would end up in tears as thoughts taunted me that I wasn’t good enough, my words didn’t matter, and that my life no longer mattered.

Depression became a chapter in my story that I didn’t know how to write my way through, and I didn’t know to live with. So, I stopped writing because I was afraid.

One thing I would do on the days I could get out of the house was go to the grocery store and buy fresh flowers for my home. Flowers made me happy. My roommate asked me if I had ever made the arrangements myself. I never had. At her prompting, I started buying individual cut flowers and making flower arrangements for the house. After a while, this became a sort of therapy for me. I began to look forward to going to the store and finding new flowers. I began to make them for my friends that I knew were going through hard seasons in life too, and it began to slowly lift the fog. It didn’t happen overnight but making flower arrangements began to speak to the most broken parts of my heart and I finally began to see some hope in my story.

One arrangement at a time, I began to feel a sense of purpose and that there was more to my story. After some time, I started noticing the urge to write was slowly but surely coming back, but I felt it had a different purpose this time around.

I launched Made Beautiful in late 2018 based on a scripture that says, “He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart, yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end (Ecclesiastes 3:11).” It is a faith-based blog and floral company.

Made Beautiful is my message to the world with my words and floral arrangements that just like there many different flowers that have different purposes, some aren’t the prettiest, some have thorns and hurt, and they seem to sprout out of nowhere so are the seasons of our lives. Every season has a purpose. Some aren’t the prettiest and a lot of them hurt. But just as a florist can take any flower and make a beautiful floral arrangement, God is arranging the seasons and circumstances in our lives and they will be made beautiful in its time.

Has it been a smooth road?
I wish I could meet the person with a smooth road. At one point in this journey, I remember crying to a girlfriend saying, “I just want my life back.” To which she replied, “What about a new life?”

I have always had some level of confidence that I was on the right path. When this hard season of my life began, I felt like I was stripped away of everything I knew to be true about myself whether it be by harmful words that were spoken over me, people walking away, doors closed, my failures and mistakes, and having to eventually walk away from the life I knew for a new one that I didn’t know was possible. I no longer believed in myself enough to begin dreaming again.

Then I began to pay attention to the things that came naturally to me, the areas people were affirming me in, what sparked joy in my mending heart, and where I felt the most peace. Even on the days, I didn’t believe that I could have a new life or live free from depression and anxiety, I made a choice to believe in myself. More importantly, I chose to believe what God said was true of me and what was possible for me. I surrounded myself with like-minded women who loved God and were ready to surround me with love and affirm the woman I was. I started taking floral arrangement classes, signed up for writing conferences, and got a writing coach as the urge to write started coming back. I made the choice to believe that no amount of brokenness, depression, or anything else would have the final word in my life.

All this to say, life is more times bitter than it is sweet, and we sometimes want the perfect ending to a story turned sour. But what if the real beauty is learning how to endure through the hard chapters and trust that the One who is writing our story has accounted for every chapter of mourning and tearing down with plans to help us have joy and build us up if we will have the courage to turn the page. I would say to the girl who is just starting their journey or starting over, “What about a new life?”

We’d love to hear more about Made Beautiful.
I believe what sets me apart from others is my heart to serve people whether it be through my writing or floral arrangements. My desire with Made Beautiful Floral is to help add beauty to people’s stories whether it be the husband surprising his wife with flowers or the bride and groom working on a smaller budget for their wedding. I was so inspired by the story of my first bride and groom, that I only charged them for the flowers for their special day. It was my honor to serve them in this way, and I believe that God honors us when we give. Does that mean I will do every event this way? Absolutely not LOL. However, I want to keep a heart of service to help create a beautiful memory for people to look back on when the harder seasons of life hit. It was flowers that helped me see beauty on the worst of days.

With my writing, I want to offer people Truth and Hope found in the gospel of Jesus Christ. The dream to be a writer is still unfolding. I released my first devotional, “Lies Create Limitations” this Spring and more ideas are coming.

Do you feel like there was something about the experiences you had growing up that played an outsized role in setting you up for success later in life?
I mentioned that I was raised in the church. My mother made me sing in the youth choir when I was little, and I hated every moment of it. However, at one of the lowest moments of the depression, I was sitting in my room not sure what else to do, so I started singing. I started singing a song with the lyrics, “There’s a bright side somewhere. There’s a bright side somewhere. Don’t you stop until you find it. Cause there’s a bright side somewhere.” This was a song that we sang in the youth choir.

I look back on that moment and realize that as I sat among the broken pieces of my life that somewhere in the rubble was the seeds of faith planted when I was a rebellious preteen. Seeds that wouldn’t be harvested until just the right time. I could go on and on about my childhood, but I believe that the foundation of faith, no matter how I might have strayed from the path in other seasons of life, is what set me up for success in every sense of life. My faith is what carries me everyday of my life no matter the situation. I know there will always be a bright side and it will be beautiful.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.madebeautiful.co
• Email: info@madebeautiful.co
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/terashaburrell/

Image Credit:
Charles Beason, Renee Jael + Co

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