Our Story - Part One

I’m a 2nd grade teacher who recently made the decision to go to graduate school. I didn’t make this decision because I hate my job and want a new one or need a higher salary in order for my job to be “worth it.” I made this decision for an opposite reason entirely. I absolutely adore teaching second grade. I know beyond the shadow of a doubt that I am right where God wants me to be. You’ll rarely hear me complaining about how hard my job is. Don’t get me wrong-- it takes me all the way to the edges of my human limits on the regular. In fact, I would go as far as to say it pushes me to those limits most of the time. It’s not for the faint of heart. But I love my job. I love spending my days with sharp, witty, inspirational little humans every day. I love seeing their eyes light up when they finally understand. I love to understand new things too, and I connect with them in deep ways in those moments. I love the process of learning. I’m getting my masters degree in Instructional Technology because I love teaching and I love learning and well, we are learning in the very digital twenty-first century. My very first class is taking us back to review some of the most basic scientific theories on human behavior and learning. I’m eating it up. The learning process is really quite simple when it comes right down to it. First, we hear or observe new information. This happens to us all day long, every day of our lives. Next, we either connect it to something else in our life and remember it, or we fail to connect it with anything, in which case the information becomes meaningless and we forget . If we make that connection and find meaning, one of two things will happen: It will either get buried in our memory forever, eventually getting wiped out, OR we will recall the information while it’s still in short-term memory and apply it to a new scenario until we finally understand. The more opportunities we have to practice and apply a new concept, the better we understand it and understanding is learning. It’s as easy as 1, 2, 3 (and 4). Hear/observe, connect, practice and apply, understand. So easy.

Right?

I see it play out in my classroom every day. Over and over and over again, numerous times a day.

But what happens when our ears are covered and our eyes are closed tight? What happens when we fail to make the connection? What happens when our own short-sightedness causes us to miss the big picture? What happens when we are so busy pitching a fit about not getting what we want, when we want it that we miss the whole point of the lesson? What happens when the information is eternally important and actually concerns our eternity and we miss the whole point?

It happened to me recently. And I know it will happen again. And it happens to you! Do you know how to make sure you’re listening when our Greatest Teacher is trying to teach a lesson? I’m not sure I can single-handedly impart this skill to any of you, but what I can do is tell you my story. I’ve felt it necessary to begin writing down the story of my learning breakdown. The details of my story are just too big to be limited within the confines of my own heart. It needs to be shared. It’s a matter of conscience. So without further ado, here I go…

For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Betsy NeSmith and I live in Athens, Georgia with my husband, David, and golden retriever, Oliver. I’m 31 years old and have been teaching second grade for two years now. Teaching is my second, but without a doubt my final, career choice. I can’t even call it a career, because I feel so called by God to do what I do everyday. I am so incredibly blessed to be living out God’s purpose for my life. I may not have discovered it before or even during my college years, but I discovered it. To me, this felt like a major, top-of-the-bucket-list accomplishment. It felt miraculous.  Many of us make it all the way to the end of our time here on earth without ever discovering our true calling, or using the spiritual gifts God has given us. I feel like I could write an entire post on this topic, so maybe I’ll do that so I can get back to my story.

David and I met eleven years ago in the spring of 2005. David had recently graduated from college and was looking for his first apartment in the Atlanta area. I (at the tender age of 19) had recently begun my first career in real estate by way of the property management industry. I leased and managed class A apartment homes, and unbeknownst to me at the time, David can and will sniff out the best of the best for himself. The man knows what he wants out of life and that usually consists of the finest quality everything. I’ve learned to simultaneously love this about him and roll my eyes all at the same time. Anyway, David walked into my leasing office and basically demanded I give him my number. I put up a good fight, but in the end, he won me over, moved into the apartment directly below mine and the rest, as they say, is history! We knew almost immediately that God would bless our life together and David popped the question just six months into our relationship. Rightfully so, this completely freaked out my parents. I was a 20 year-old leasing consultant who didn’t have a college degree and was trying to get married to a man who did have a degree but didn’t have a JOB. (He was fired a bunch, but that’s his story to tell, not mine.) After some screaming matches and a whole lot of convincing, my parents gave their blessings (and entire bank account) for our union, and we were married on a chilly and overcast spring day in 2006. The backdrop of our wedding was so, so perfect. I’m not sure how many of you reading this knows about or has visited Lake Burton, but I encourage each and every one of you to find a way to do so. It is becoming increasingly difficult to visit, however, as the level of exclusivity presently surrounding the tiny Northeast Georgia Mountain lake is kind of mind-boggling. Movie stars, champion football coaches, and grammy-winning country music stars are just a few of the latest homebuyers. In contrast, our wedding was utterly simple and inexpensive. It had to be no-frills, as my parents have always had limited resources, but I would have had it no other way. With a backdrop as breathtakingly beautiful as Lake Burton, what more do you need? The reason this venue was chosen was because of the special meaning and spiritual significance it had in David’s story up-to-that-point, and still does in so many ways. Although today our visits there look and feel much different than they did ten years ago.

Ten years.

Ten years ago our journey together as husband and wife began. We had such big plans for ourselves as individuals and as a couple. I would continue pursuing a career in real estate and David would finally land on a profession for himself --home building. He would build the finest, fanciest of homes. (Imagine that.)  (I wish I had the laughing emoji or better yet, the squinty eyed, tongue-out one to insert here.) He knocked it out of the park, y’all. He is so, so talented at designing and building exactly what he dreams up in his creative mind. He worked as a superintendent for a spec builder in Atlanta for a while and felt immediate success. I worked as an assistant property manager at an apartment community in the vicinity.

Because of amazing mentoring, one thing David and I found crucially important before getting married was deciding on a church family to become a part of. While living in Atlanta, we became very involved in Buckhead Church of North Point Ministries. (Is it even okay to drop a shameless shout-out on here?) Being so plugged-in to such a wonderful church was a huge blessing and a big part of our story as a newlywed couple. The church is very much so credited for facilitating the work David and I did to lay a strong foundation rooted in Christ for our marriage. We were baptized together there, led a small group there, and served special-needs children together there.

We were doing important work, but we were the definition of the term blissfully wed. No storms, no hiccups, just pure joy filled our lives. Before long, we grew bored I guess, and we decided to move full-time to the Lake Burton area in Rabun County (Lord knows we couldn’t afford to buy a place on the actual lake, although that was the dream at the time). Neither David nor I have ever struggled in the area of self-confidence so we both felt ready to each respectively pursue self-employment. We had big, big dreams for ourselves, y’all. From this moment, our plans were to have David build fancy lake homes while I listed and sold them, making us THE Lake Burton power couple and would become millionaires in no time! We pursued this plan for about a year before God began ever-so-slowly redirecting our path. David will tell you the next part of our story was HIS first big learning opportunity from God, but again, I’ll let his story be his to tell. Long story short, the housing market crashed, leaving the fancy-pants builder and inexperienced real estate agent high and dry with no income to speak of. Consider our earth shaken. But the storms were only just beginning for us. Literally and figuratively. Let me continue.

David was busy building his first house on Lake Burton, and although he will tell you he should have been payed more for that first job, he was thrilled to have his foot in the door and super motivated to continue pursuing his dreams, undeterred by the panic ensuing in the bigger cities concerning the housing market. I, on the other hand, was not staying busy in Real Estate. We now lived in a very political small mountain town. I knew this going in, so logically, I decided to volunteer myself for everything to build up my political reputation. I volunteered as the chairman of the Christmas Tour of Homes committee. This was a huge fundraising effort that the Board of Realtors held every Christmas to raise money for a local organization providing financial assistance to underprivileged families. We raised over $20,000 the year I presided over the organizing committee and I definitely stayed busy during those months leading up. I also volunteered as member and secretary for the local Junior Women’s Club. This was fun and rewarding, as all of our fundraising efforts were dedicated to sending local deserving girls to college. I absolutely loved the feeling of contributing to a child’s education. Speaking of education, I was also volunteering as a mentor at the local middle school. I absolutely loved every moment of being in that school environment. Real Estate? What Real Estate? I was busy, but I was feeling like I was losing my direction and my sense of purpose. I didn’t like the feeling at all.

Then, just like that, a light bulb came on.

David and I were on our way home from going to see a movie with a friend. The theater was 25 minutes away, so we had carpooled with our friend and were having pleasant conversation on the car ride home. This “friend” was actually a friend’s mother who had a home on the lake and was just as dear to us as her daughter was. Her opinion mattered to us. She was a retired teacher, herself, and said simply, “Betsy, you should go back to school to be a teacher.” That’s when the light clicked on. It was like God, Himself, had spoken the words to me. Ironically enough, I had been told that my entire life. Both my parents were in education and I was given this advice countless times but proudly rejected the counsel, having seen firsthand the behind-the-scenes life of a teacher and I wanted none of that for myself. I was going to work smarter, not harder, and make much more money than a teacher ever could. But this time was so different. It felt like a brand new suggestion. I knew immediately it was the right thing for me to do.

So in July 2009, super last-minute, I enrolled for fall semester at UGA. This was following a very important, albeit brief, discussion with David about what this meant for our future. We had been married four and a half years and were beginning to feel like we may want children soon. Going back to get my degree would mean putting this off another four years at least. We decided together that it was the right decision and just like that, I was about to be a 25 year-old college freshman. I kept my real estate license active for a time and even tried to do school and real estate simultaneously, but quickly lost interest in the latter. I commuted to Athens two or three days a week for the first three semesters, an hour and a half drive. Then spring semester 2011 happened. During registration for this semester, I discovered I was going to have to tackle 18 hours of coursework if I was to finish all my prerequisites and be ready to enter my Early Childhood program the following fall as planned. I would no longer be able to commute from home unless I was interested in 15 hours in the car each week. No thank you. I would need to find a place to stay in Athens Monday thru Friday. We had been married for almost five years and this was the most foreign of concepts. This would be our biggest test of faith up-to-that-point. Trusting God when deciding to move to the mountains was a small test of faith. Trusting God in going back to school to be a teacher was a slightly bigger test of faith. Living apart from your husband five days a week for four months? Much bigger deal.

Okay, God, we’ve got this.

Boot straps were pulled up and we hunkered down and made it through. It was hard though. There were tense moments. David endured winter months in the mountains all by himself (which are brutal and depressing, even with a companion) and there were days and weeks I knew he struggled with resentment. I’ll never forget my feelings of excitement and relief as I spent a Wednesday evening in late April writing a final paper for a history class and studying for a final in another class. The semester was over for me on Friday and I would be getting home just in time to celebrate our five year anniversary. This Wednesday evening, I was half-listening to the TV, half-focused on my schoolwork. Earlier that day, a professor had emailed our class to tell us to watch a system of storms that were moving into the southeast. The class we were in was a science prerequisite and we had just completed a unit on weather patterns. She had explained that this particular storm system had all the characteristics of a superstorm and would be one going into the record books and that we wouldn’t want to miss the action. As I worked on my paper, I kept hearing about storm damage in Alabama. Apparently, this particular weather system had produced a powerful EF4 tornado that would completely destroy many parts of Tuscaloosa. I saw the pictures on the TV screen. I remember feeling scared for the people who had just lost everything. I said a quick prayer and then muted my TV so I could focus. I couldn’t focus. I kept looking back up to my muted TV, pausing when radar images and storm paths were displayed. The storms were entering Georgia now and not getting weaker. I turned my volume up slightly and kept working on my paper. It was beginning to get dark and my paper was nowhere near finished and due in hours first thing the next morning. I needed to focus. That’s when I heard some scary words from the meteorologist- Spalding County and Northeast Georgia. The worst of the storms were heading straight toward all the people I love most in this world. This would prove to be a very long and frightening night for me. I immediately called my family in Griffin. I think it was late-ish, maybe around 9PM. I told them all I loved them and to please be safe and keep me updated. I then called David. He was living temporarily in a friend’s lake house while we secured another place to live.

Y’all. Telling your story pared-down enough not to be long and boring is hard. I left out a part! Let me back up for just a second. When we initially moved up to Rabun County, we lived with David’s parents in their gorgeous, newly-built lake house. We lived with them for about six months while David built a precious three-stall horse barn for his mother on a tract of land she had owned for a while with the hopes of eventually putting her horses there. The agreement was for David to build the 2-story barn with an apartment on the top floor, and we would rent the space from her and help care for her horses. Well, David’s father had recently developed some condominiums in the area and when the housing market crashed, the condos stopped selling and he lost the development AND their lake house to the bank. (The difficult part for David to wrestle with was that the lake house had been paid for free and clear until the condos stopped selling. His father decided to lien his personal home to pay interest, hence why it was taken by the bank too.) David had moved us out of the barn and into a friend’s lake house temporarily the week before so his parents could move into the barn. Okay, back to the story.

I called David. I kept him on the phone as I watched this monstrous storm cell move closer and closer to his precise location on the radar map. I begged him to leave the house he was in and go to his parents’, well it was soon to be the bank’s, lake house. It was bigger and stronger. It would easily be able to stand up to the storm. The house David was in was really old. It leaned and creaked and felt structurally unsound when you were in it. I definitely would NOT want to be there during a strong storm. I urged him to get in his truck and flee the scene immediately. He could even put his truck in the garage to protect it from falling limbs and hail damage. He disregarded my suggestion and asked to hang up so he could go on to bed. He said the storms wouldn’t be that bad and he’d talk to me in the morning. I stayed up until well-after midnight watching the radar and checking on my people. David never answered another phone call that night. I was so scared. I prayed harder that night than I had ever prayed before. And I hurried to finish my paper.

When my alarm sounded the following morning to wake me for class, I quickly turned it off and tried calling David. He didn’t answer. I called my parents and my brother who lived in Griffin and confirmed they were all okay, although there was pretty sever damage just miles from their homes and a couple of tornadoes had actually touched down. I grabbed for my computer which was in arm’s reach before ever getting out of bed. I searched for evidence of storm damage in the Lake Burton area and stumbled upon some raw helicopter footage that had already been posted online. It was so bad, y’all. After watching the footage two or three times, I recognized one of the properties that had been destroyed. It was David’s parents’ home. In that moment, I knew it had been God, and not David’s stubbornness, that had kept him from listening to my suggestions. 

Here is a before pic of their beautiful home:

And here is the after:

It was an EF3 tornado. The exact same tornado that had hit Tuscaloosa earlier that day and had only weakened slightly. Our world was quite literally shaken. David eventually called me back. He was safe, but crying uncontrollably. He had just seen firsthand the pure devastation that had occurred the night before. When he woke up, he had tried leaving in his truck to go help some friends who were trapped at their house. He quickly found out that he was pretty stuck as well. Trees were down everywhere blocking all the roads that led away from where he was staying. So he got on his boat and began to survey the damage to his beloved lake. He was devastated and entered into a long period of sadness in his life. The sadness would be intensified just a few short weeks later when his father informed him he would be leaving his mother and filing for divorce.

What was happening?? All of a sudden, our neat and tidy life seemed so scary and uncertain. I moved back to Rabun, David and I quickly found a permanent place to live and we spent the summer licking our wounds. David had finished building the house and was having trouble finding more work. Everyone, including the potential investor, was waiting for things to become a little more stable in the housing market. I brought up the topic of moving to Athens to David. I had absolutely loved my semester there, aside from missing my husband, and felt like David and I could have a wonderful life there together. Understandably so, David was having none of it. He was probably feeling like his beloved lake, the one place he has felt closest to God for his entire life, was being ripped away from him and he felt desperate to hold on to it for as long as he could. David decided to start a new business that summer and we decided I would find another place to rent in Athens M-F for fall semester. I found a place, moved-in in early August 2011, and wished David luck as he set out to grow a brand new business in Rabun called All Clear Windows & Gutters. He was offering exterior home maintenance services to people on the lake, cleaning windows and gutters and pressure washing. David discovered almost immediately how difficult finding work in the fall would prove to be in the very seasonal vacation home market. On a weekday in early September, David called me and said he was ready to move to Athens.

So that’s the story of how we landed in Athens. Again, I could write an entire post on how much I love my town. I might do that eventually, but for now I’ll spare you and get to the good part. David and I moved to our first home in Athens with just enough money for a deposit and first month’s rent. I was in school full time and not making any income for our family so the weight of that burden fell entirely on David and he was starting from scratch. No customers, no savings, no nothing. Looking back I don’t even know how he did it, but he worked harder than any human being I have ever met, and he made sure our bills were paid and we had food to eat. This is just one of the many reasons why he is my hero. Because of financial strains and my inability to adequately supplement our income, our marriage experienced a growing tension that reached a peak just before I graduated. I vividly remember heated arguments that I saw no way out of except choosing between staying in school and staying married. David was growing weary and desperately needed my financial support. We were both praying desperately for my graduation to HURRY UP AND GET HERE ALREADY. Well, finally it did. We used a bunch of money we had no business spending and we threw a big back-yard party. I cooked the food-- authentic Cuban black beans and rice with all the fixings and we invited every single person we knew. It stormed about half-way through the meal, sending all of our guests scurrying into our TINY house, but we didn’t let that spoil the mood of the evening. It felt absolutely incredible to finally be finished with that season of our life. Now all I needed to do was secure a teaching job. Poor David would end up having to support us for an entire year longer, because I might have been overly selective about where I wanted to work and I wasn’t hired anywhere that summer.  I took a job as a parapro in a kindergarten classroom at a school I was hoping to get hired at as a homeroom teacher. I made next to nothing, but we finally had decent health benefits. A few things were realized at this time- First, David would continue feeling the heaviness of being our sole income provider. Second, after that long four-year journey through school and waiting to have kids, we would have to wait another year longer. Third, my pride and my self-confidence were going to need some repair work, because I had never, ever had any trouble getting or keeping a job.  This was a lot to process, but process it I did. 

However, I was so looking forward to the spring. That would be the moment I would finally find my dream job and we would finally begin the process of expanding our family. We would finally get to our “happily ever after.”I just knew our hardships would be ending very, very soon.