April 2013
Portland Brew, Nashville, Tennessee
I’m a Georgia girl at heart. I slept in a University of Georgia T-shirt for more nights in middle school than I care to admit. I’ve been cheering for the Atlanta Braves since Dale Murphy wore the uniform in the 80s. My parents still live in the same house they built in 1980 on the property my grandparents have occupied since the 1950s. I grew up in Marietta, a cute little Southern town where the same guy has done my parents’ dry cleaning for thirty years and the waitresses from Po Folks Restaurant came to my grandmother’s funeral. You know, Mayberry kind of stuff, but with more cliques and monogrammed purses and high school football games. For me, my childhood in Georgia tastes like salty boiled peanuts and fresh-picked blackberries, smells like honeysuckle on the other side of the lake, and looks like Wednesday night supper in the Family Life Hall of First United Methodist Church right off the Marietta Square.
When it was time to pick a college, I looked no farther than eighty miles down the road to my mother’s and grandmother’s alma mater, the University of Georgia. With lifelong friends studying there and my home church’s youth pastor now a campus minister, it was a perfect place for me.
I graduated from the University of Georgia and stayed in Athens for three years after that. You would too if you knew Athens. I logged a billion hours at Jittery Joe’s Coffee Shop and cheered for those Dawgs during football games like I literally was on the field. (I still struggle with this — being overly invested in sports games I’m simply a spectator to. So consider that a warning next time we are together on a fall football Saturday afternoon or at a Vanderbilt baseball game.)
I also stayed in Athens because our church in Marietta had gone through a majorly painful split the fall of my freshman year of college. Relationships were severed, and I felt church-homeless. Because of the nastiness of the split and because my family was part of the crowd that left, I was no longer welcome in the building I had grown up in and knew like the back of my hand. Unfortunately, I also didn’t feel like a part of the new church that had formed in my absence.
I like to stay comfortable, and Athens was comfortable. I graduated and got a job teaching fifth grade in a neighboring county, but my life was in Athens — my friends, my church, my home . . .
Until my best friend Haley’s wedding rehearsal back in my hometown, when Mark, a longtime friend and the youth pastor at the new church, leaned out the driver’s side window of his truck and said, “Annie, I think it’s time for you to move back home.” It was almost out of nowhere, though we had discussed a bit how I missed home now that so many friends who had grown up there were building lives around that same downtown square.
He was right. It was time. I moved back to Marietta at the end of that school year. I was twenty-five, seven years out of my hometown nest, and now I was coming home. I was mature (self-described), single, and ready to put down some roots.
I bought a house. I invested in our local church by volunteering with the youth group, and I got a great teaching job at Woodstock Elementary School. Fourth graders. I loved the life I had built.
I’m sure it wasn’t the perfect experience that I recall, but my mind remembers it fondly, and I’m okay with that. I was home to stay.
In October 2007, I started to feel something unsettled in my spirit. That’s the best way I can describe it. I would pray and pray and never feel like I knew what was up, but I knew something was stirring. After weeks of this weird feeling, I felt like I had to really press into it. I couldn’t handle the tension anymore.
In my adorable little house, I walked up the steps to my bedroom and sat cross-legged on my four-poster bed. With my journal in hand, I began to write. I wrote out a prayer, asking God to direct me and asking him what was changing. I sensed I was supposed to make a change. I felt it being whispered in my heart, but I just didn’t know what that change was.
“Should I change churches?” I wrote in my journal-cursive, a more bubbly and expressive script than my everyday. I sat there, mulling over the question, not feeling like that was it. So I tried again.
“Should I sell my house?” Nope. That didn’t check out with my insides either. So I kept listing.
I wrote about changing jobs, changing small groups, changing families (just kidding).
Twenty-ish questions down the line, I wrote, “Am I supposed to move to Nashville?”
And it took my breath away. What? Why would I even write that? I had visited Nashville for approximately twenty hours one other time in my life, but certainly hadn’t ever been there with hopes or plans to live there.
While it was only a three-and-a-half-hour drive north from Marietta, the worlds couldn’t have been more different. In my mind, Nashville was all country music and big hair and a neon-lit downtown. To be honest, Nashville didn’t have any more descriptors than that because I didn’t think about it. Marietta was home, and Georgia was all I knew.
I sat on my bed in my house in my town and knew I was losing my mind, and I knew I was right. It was a weird combination of emotions.
And with that, my prayers changed rapidly and drastically. While the listening and questioning phase was full of peace even while being tense, I was now full of panic. “Please, no, God. Please, please, no. Don’t make me do that. Don’t make me leave my family and my church and my home and my friends and my life. Please. I can’t. I can’t do it. I can’t leave them. I’m sorry I ever started this. Can we both pretend like this never happened?”
It was about losing everything. I was terrified. I barely like to go to the bathroom alone — I certainly didn’t want to move to a new state alone. To live in a place other than Georgia felt absolutely foreign and unnecessary. I mean, have you seen that orange Tennessee fans have to wear? I knew I couldn’t bear it.
I told no one. I didn’t utter a word. Maybe, just maybe, I had made the whole thing up and if I just kept quiet about it, the nudging and the whispers would go away.
So I secretly prayed for weeks. “Lord, please tell me I’m wrong and I made this up.” I cannot tell you how many times I apologized for starting that prayer that day in October. I was furious with myself for not just ignoring the whispers in my heart until they went away. I didn’t want the answer I had gone after. I didn’t want it at all. I cried myself to sleep night after night as I thought through all the many things this meant — leaving my family, selling my house that I had only owned for three years, not being around to see my best friends’ children grow up in front of my eyes on a daily basis.
But it never went away. That one question written in bubbly script gripped me. Nashville? Seriously?
It was November. I knew I had to teach school through the spring. It wouldn’t be until the next summer that I could move to Nashville.
By Christmas, I realized I needed to start saying this stuff aloud. First on a family drive to Birmingham, I told my parents through tears. To my absolute shock, they agreed. “That sounds like a God idea, Annie,” I remember my mom saying. I wanted them to disagree, to tell me I was crazy, to tell me all the reasons it was a bad idea.
But they didn’t.
On New Year’s Day, I told my two best friends, Haley and Molly. We sat on Haley’s living room floor as I shared the story, and thankfully they were on my side — the side that said this was a lunatic idea and I had for sure just made it up. “If you want to be a writer,” Haley said, “can’t you just do that in Atlanta? There have got to be a lot of Atlanta writers around.” For a solid twenty minutes we brainstormed. And then we stopped and the tears leaked as we realized the truth. God was asking me to be braver than I had ever thought possible, and it was going to bring sadness to us all.
I think that was the hardest part for me, really. Realizing there were so many other people — family, friends, students, my small group, coworkers — who were going to be affected by this choice. I wasn’t the only one whose life would be disrupted by my leaving.
Before I told the general public, I figured I should visit the city. People were already going to think I had lost my mind for leaving Marietta. They would really think I had fallen off the deep end if I told them I was leaving for a city I had never spent a full day in.
There was one married couple, friends from college, who lived there, and though we hadn’t spoken in seven years, I shot them a quick email in which I explained that I would like to visit Nashville on the Martin Luther King holiday weekend in January — but “don’t worry, I don’t want to move there; I just want to visit for the weekend.”
(Now when we talk about it, Mandy and Kevin say they knew right away that God was up to something that could end up with me living in their town. Fine, they were right.)
The weekend arrived, and after my teaching day ended that Friday, I hopped into my little red car and headed toward Nashville. I turned onto I-75N off the Barrett Parkway overpass, and I wasn’t even out of my hometown zip code before I began to weep. If I hadn’t been sure before, that moment made me sure. The Holy Spirit filled that car, and I knew I was driving to the city where God was asking me to live.
I cried the entire drive.
Three and a half hours.
Now I know this wasn’t leaving for a spot halfway around the world, but this Georgia girl would be moving farther away from home than she ever dreamed.
I never felt brave. I never had a moment of extreme courage or belief that this was going to be the best decision I had ever made.
I just did the next thing.
Quit my job.
Sold my house.
Packed my belongings.
Pointed north until I crossed the state line and didn’t stop until I saw the trademark of the Nashville skyline — the Batman building.
There are so many stories, so many moments when God injected faith and assurance into my deflated heart because he knew I needed it. He knew I was just wimpy enough to back out without a few shoves in the months before I moved.
A kind email from a friend.
A connection to a Nashville resident through a mutual friend.
An hour-long car ride with my friend Gary, who simply said, “Move to Nashville. If it doesn’t work out, move home.” (Ah, Gary reminding me not to be afraid to try and even be willing to fail. “Take the penalty kick, kid,” he was saying.)
Just a sampling of the tiny gifts God gave me to remind me to be brave.
The first Sunday in August, I loaded my car and my mom’s van, and together we drove to this new town empty of friends and history, and she left me there.
And all of a sudden, it was done. The thing that had been in the front of my mind and prayers and worries was no longer off in the future. It was here. I was here.
No friends.
No church family.
No family.
No idea where the post office, grocery store, or hospital was.
I won’t bore you with stories of the weeping and gnashing of teeth that occurred for the first weeks (okay, fine, months), but it was terribly painful.
Can I say this again? I never felt brave. I never felt like I had what it took to be there. But I had no choice. I had a new address, and it was time to live there.
So I said yes to every “let’s grab coffee” offer, and I had met some people — Jason, another Annie, and Marisa particularly — who generously shared their friends with me. I made myself go to church when I wanted to lie on my bed. I forced myself to drive to the Kroger grocery store in my neighborhood when my car wanted to point to Georgia. I saw how other people dressed — way trendier than my former life as an elementary school teacher — and realized I needed to make some adjustments to my wardrobe of fleece pullovers and jeans.
I just did the best I could to live somewhere that wasn’t home.
Day after day, I just did the next thing, took the next step, said the next yes. And God built a life for me in Nashville that I could not have dreamed up for myself.
Three years after that first prayer that led me on this Nashville journey, I turned thirty.
In the backyard of Dave and Annie’s house, eight of my dearest girlfriends sat around a beautifully decorated table as ten or so guys from our community served us a delicious meal. Lights were strung from the trees, and my friend Skip moved from angle to angle, professionally photographing the whole thing. No detail had been overlooked. It was the most perfect party I’ve ever had. From the muted gold décor to the grapefruit and avocado salad, Dave and Annie created an evening perfectly built for me.
The plates were cleared and the boys stood on the deck steps and sang “Happy Birthday,” and, being that tears are my go-to mode of self-expression, I just cried. I thanked them all and told them the truth. I never thought Nashville would be my home, and I never thought I would have people who knew me so deeply. And yet, here we were.
We cleaned the plates and cleared the tables. Within an hour, almost a hundred people had come through that backyard to celebrate my milestone birthday.
I had never felt so overwhelmingly grateful.
It was the perfect night.
Nashville now? Years after that moving day? It’s my home in every way. I am a better Annie than I’ve ever been before — less comfortable, to be sure, but more confident. I know God better and deeper. I know myself better as well.
Moving to Nashville never made sense, but it was right. I don’t know all the whys of Nashville, but I see in my life every day that the story God is telling is best set in this town, personally and professionally. I came to this city reluctantly brave at best, a total wimp in all honesty. When I first heard God about the move, I thought he was asking me to give him everything. And in many ways, that was true. But the truer thing? God asked me to open my hands, and he gave me the world.