Leah Diann Darrow
“I was born in Oklahoma, in a Catholic family. I am the eldest of 6 children and I would like people to have a family like mine. I grew up loving my faith...
Watching TV I was trying to figure out who I wanted to be. And I said to myself: "a beautiful and exciting girl". I began to absorb the television beauty model.”
I did everything a good Catholic shouldn't do and I measured myself only by my beauty: I wanted everyone to love me and appreciate me for how I looked. I believed in God yes, but I didn't think He was interested in my life. I thought he just judged me, not that he loved me. After a few castings I participated in the auditions for the reality show America's Next Top Model…
I remember shooting the reality show in the luxurious Waldorf-Astoria in New York: they had removed the doors to the rooms and the curtains to the showers. Zero privacy: our dignity was trampled on.
... fashion was not the environment I had imagined, easy, beautiful and fun. In reality, everyone pushes you to always give something more: longer hair, more make-up on your eyes, a more flashy beauty... It's never enough ". Despite being overwhelmed by the frenzy of fashion, between sequins and catwalks, "I knew deep down that I was not glorifying God with what I was doing" reflects the former model.
“Around me, however, everyone repeated that just being beautiful and famous is a guarantee of happiness. What a lie! At night I would go back to my apartment, take off my make-up, and then I had to really deal with my unhappiness: I was selling out my beauty for money...
That all changed in the middle of a photo shoot for a major international men's-only magazine. That photoshoot was a real encounter with God, unexpected, unplanned and unwanted.
They asked me to wear a very skimpy, very sexy dress. Immediately I thought “ok I do it, it's my job” But I felt the discontent growing inside me. The photographer started taking pictures. And a flash hit me, not in the face, but inside of me: I saw a photograph of me, with that little dress on, in front of God. I then asked myself "What are you offering to God?" At that moment I realized that I had spent ten years of my life in selfishness. In disinterest in others, for my family, for God. Yet the world did not give back all the attention I gave it by being a model! " Leah has decided: she slams the door and leaves.
"I wanted to change my life, but I couldn't do it alone, so I asked God for help. I called my father ... He rang the door with the most beautiful smile in the world and the first thing he said to me was:" I'm happy to see you again. Now let's go to confession."
God has given me many talents and I want to give him back my beauty and my heart: I want to give them to Him and to no one else”. In my past as a model I realized that it gives me much more peace to believe in God than in the way of thinking about the world. What really matters is the answer you will give in life to these two questions: what is love? And what is happiness?
If you do not have these answers, the world will give them to you as it pleases. And the world does not love you: God will love you instead. In my life, now I have only one purpose: I want God, looking at me, to smile at me”.
from the magazine “TEMPI” – 2 nov 2011
www.leahdarrow.com