TRANSCEND: A Journey Toward Love.

 

Why This Story Matters — and why TRANSCEND: A Journey Toward Love exists. What Mark and LaRee Pickup have lived is more than a personal journey. It is a testimony we believe God intends to use for others. TRANSCEND is more than a movie.

It’s a declaration of hope — and a loving response to a culture that too often gives up on marriage, on life, on disability, and on the belief that love can endure when suffering lasts far longer than expected.

This film speaks directly into our moment.

In a world where families are under pressure, marriages are tested, disability is misunderstood, and hardship is met with despair or anguish, TRANSCEND offers a different message: Love can persevere, faith can deepen, and every life has immeasurable value — no matter how long or rough the road or how heavy the cost.

By supporting this campaign and the development of TRANSCEND, you are helping lay the foundation for a film that will:

- Encourage marriages to persevere through long seasons of trial

- Give voice, dignity, and visibility to people living with disabilities

- Strengthen pro-life convictions with compassion, truth, and humanity

- Share a Christ-centered vision of sacrificial, covenant love

- Reach audiences far beyond the church through professional, high-quality filmmaking

Your financial support directly helps underwrite the work required to bring this story to the screen. This includes strengthening the script, assembling a world-class creative team, and preparing a professional production and financing package capable of attracting distributors and partners worldwide.

Just as importantly, your prayers and partnership declare that stories like this still matter — stories that point people back to God’s design for love, commitment, endurance, and human worth.

If you have ever longed to see films that honor Christ, uplift families, and speak truth with grace and beauty, we invite you to be part of making TRANSCEND possible.

From the beginning until now, God has carried us.

We believe He is still writing this story — and we are deeply grateful to those who feel led to walk with us into this next chapter.

                                                                 LaRee Pickup 

Our story is a Christian love story— one we never expected to live, and one we have only survived by the grace of God.

When we were young, we were active, full of plans, and building a life together. We were the kind of couple who believed hard things could be overcome with prayer, perseverance, and love—but we didn't yet understand what it would truly require. 

Not long into our marriage, everything started to change. My husband began to lose strength in his body, little by little. What started as small signs became something far more terrifying: a catastrophic, degenerative neurological disease that slowly stole his mobility. Overtime, paralysis crept in, and eventually he was confined to a wheelchair.

And then the years kept coming and turn into decades.

The kind of decades that test everything you thought you knew about love, marriage, and faith. There were seasons where the stakes were horribly high  —  times we faced fear, uncertainty, financial strain, and the emotional toll of watching someone you love lose piece by piece their Independence, day by day. There were moments when the future felt impossible to imagine ... and yet God always gave enough strength for the next step.

We raised our children in the middle of this battle. We learned how to keep joining our home even when our circumstances were heavy. We learned how to make room for grief without surrendering hope. And through it all, we kept coming back to the same truth: God is faithful, even when life is not.

This illness has led us on a 50-year pilgrimage. 

It’s not a journey we would have chosen — but one that has deepened us in ways words can't fully explain. Overtime, God has taught us a deeper understanding of love: not just human love, but divine love. The kind of love that is patient, the kind that says please. The kind that serves. The kind that doesn't quit when the years get long.

And then …in our old age … something incredible happened

God gave us a miracle after decades in a wheelchair, after years of withered legs and the physical decline that seemed in irreversible — my husband stood! 

And then he walked. God gave us a miracle in 2018.

His legs began to strengthen and what we believed was lost started to return. We are witnessing something that feels almost impossible to describe, and we don't take it lightly. We know miracles don't always look the way we expect but we also know what we have seen.

We are starting a new chapter: one we never imagined God would write for us so late in life. From the beginning to now, God has carried us.

LaRee Pickup (depicted as Laura Fraser in the screenplay.)