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The CEO Teacher Podcast
I Believe in the Power of Moments.
00:16:12
The Moments Have Brought You Here. The Big Moments, The Small Moments, and Even The Random Moments… Moments that forever alter our lives. Some of them planned, like the birth of a newborn baby. Others out of nowhere - like randomly meeting the love...
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Hey friends and welcome back to the CEO Teacher. On today's show, I am going to share the journey of Hurricane Helene and how it forever changed my life. Not only my life, but I think the lives of everyone in my little small town of Douglas, Georgia. How it taught me one of the greatest gifts that life could ever offer and I hope that I can in some way articulate how you can use that gift in your life as well. As we move into the holiday season of gratitude and thankfulness and all of the things that come with Thanksgiving and I'll see you in today's show. Welcome to the CEO Teacher, where educators turn what they already know and love into a successful and sustainable online business with actionable strategies, simple business tips and mindset shifts. It's a weekly lesson plan for teacher business owners, whether you're teaching full time in the classroom or rocking the small business from home life. I'm your host, Kasey Morris, a former Georgia English teacher, mama to four turned seven figure online teacher, business owner and founder of the CEO Teacher Movement. Three teaching degrees got me a few extra bucks each year, but what I will show you will help you make that every single month. If you have a heart for education and a passion to use your experience to help more teachers and families, you belong here. Today's show is the story of Hurricane Helene and how it changed my life. For the good, I hope to share with you life lessons, but first I want to share our story from my little small town in Douglas, Georgia, population around 43,000 people, all of which were not prepared for September 26, 2024 the power of a Moment I've shared this before and I'll say it again. I believe in the power of moments. Moments that forever alter our lives. Some of them planned like the birth of a newborn baby, others out of nowhere like meeting the love of your life randomly by chance. Nevertheless, I believe there is a power much greater than the eyes can see, but a knowing in my heart that God's plan is perfectly mapped out for us and the beauty in it. And also the part that I hate the least is that we have no idea what he has planned for us. But I think that that is what is so special about life. I also believe that God gives us free will to orchestrate our gifts and ways that we can serve others. And I have seen that so profoundly over the last couple of weeks. I've seen the power of his hands so close to my heart and I have heard the voice of him so clearly lately that I get goose, goosebumps As I say those words, and I don't know about you, but I've experienced a feeling. And I've never told anyone this, so thanks for listening. And maybe I'm the only person I don't know, but lately I can feel God wrap his arms around me, like literally feel him hug me physically. I can feel him calm my heart. It's like a hug from an old friend or a relative that you haven't seen in a long while. And I've had a few times in my life where I felt his presence. But the night of hurricane Helene, I felt him hold me, my home, and my family in his arms. That storm was like nothing I have ever experienced. And I pray I never will again. So here's the thing about living in the southeastern United States. The media says every tropical storm and every hurricane is the worst thing ever. Sometimes they over prepare us. And once you've heard it for so many years, you just get numb to the news. Everyone in my town can attest to that. We were numb. They did not give us a lot of preparation time. Especially the bad part. Like, it was a hurricane. It turned into a hurricane. It might be bad. It's probably not going to hit us. And then it was a couple of hours before the stores shut down, and they were like, oh, it's going to be a bad hurricane the night before. You should prepare. We have a brand new Publix, y'all. We have upgraded. All we ever had was a Walmart, but we have a brand new Publix. I am probably living in there four days a week. It's one of my favorite places. It's my happy place. But it was closing early, along with all the other stores. And so half the town was in their supermarket sweeping it. That tells my age. Like, but we were shopping. Supermarket sweep. Okay. We're just grabbing the bare necessities. And I'll admit I'm an overreactor. That is what I am. But that day, I was cool as a cucumber. My boyfriend is calm. I'm normally chaos. He assured me, it's fine, babe. We're going to be fine. No big deal. Just grab some. Some basic things. So I grabbed some bread, some sandwich meat, and a pack of water in my hands. Because when I walked in the door, the manager said, hey, we're closing in 10 minutes. And I was like, okay, I'll grab this. It'll be enough. I got to chat with all the people from my hometown. My favorite part of going to Publix. And we were fine. We Were all like, hey, you know, we got what we needed. I got some batteries, you know, in case the power goes out, no big deal. Went home that night, chatted with my friends on Snapchat, called my best friend, my mama about the ETA of when this thing was gonna happen. And we determined that we'd all be sound asleep. It was projected to get bad around midnight, so we all just assumed we'd sleep through it like we do most other storms. About midnight, 12:30ish, I woke up to wind sounds that I had never heard before. I'm talking a hundred mile an hour plus ranging from 140. I've even seen things that said it was over 140 mile an hour winds for hours on end. And that is why it wrecked our town so terrible. It was not just an in and out storm. It lingered. Our lights went out around 1240. And from a family that sleeps with fans and noisemakers, like every kid has a noisemaker, every person has a loud fan in their room. The silence was haunting. It was so eerie because it left the sound of the storm so loud in our ears. My 14 year old, who's actually my least scary one of everyone, got up not long after the power went out and he came and sat with me. We talked by candlelight. My boyfriend of big faith slept the entire time. I still don't know how he managed to not wake up that night. I had my arm like grabbed his shoulder a couple of times. He says he prayed and had faith and that's how he sleeps so good. I'm gonna need God to give me some of that because I did not have that that night. As the wind speeds picked up, our phones went completely offline. Sos. No way to call, no way to snap someone, text someone, no way to check the radar. And here's the thing about facing a storm at night. You have no idea what's happening once the power goes out, once your phones go offline. All we heard was a sound of wind squalling that was worse than what you see in the movies. All we could hear was the snapping of the trees, the banging of trees hitting the ground, debris hitting the roof, hitting the side of the house. And my biggest fear, and I thought it would happen at any moment, was that my roof would come off of my home. I cut down about 17 trees two years ago when I moved into this house, so I wasn't afraid of that. But I knew everyone in my community was afraid because we live in a place where as far as you can see, there Are hundreds of pine trees no matter which way that you look so me and sigh. My 14 year old and I, we heard a loud bang and so we went into the living room to see that the front door had flown wide open. Now I have an actual storm door. It had popped open the storm door and my front door was locked and it flew the front door open. I also have a fireplace kind of directly in front of the front door on the other side of the foyer in the living room. And the fireplace, fireplace has these glass doors. The wind vortex that went down the fireplace blew the glass doors open and my front door flying open. It was like this mini hurricane tornado in my living room. We shut the door, we put a stick in between the glass doors of the fireplace. But we were scared. The rumbling was so loud and this suction was in my living room and I never experienced it. It was about 2am and it started to get so bad, Cy joked with me and said, mama, you know they say when there's a tornado, it sounds like a train. And I'll be honest, it wasn't two minutes later that we heard those train noise sounds that they talk about not once, but twice. I stood in the hallway with my hands on my children's doorknobs, praying that they just wouldn't wake up, but knowing that if our roof blew off or if the sound of the tornadoes got even louder, we had to go somewhere else in the bathroom or something. There were moments when I was certain that my brick home could not withstand the pressure anymore. But I'll be honest, I had a calmness inside of me that told me it was all going to be okay. But with that calmness, as the storm died down around 2:45, 3:00am that night, I had no idea what was on the other side of daylight the next morning. I hate when I cry on social media or podcast. So our phones were still down. Every phone, every Internet, all power. There was no way to contact anybody that you love. And I'm a family girl. I'm a mom and daddy's girl. My brothers are my best friends. And when I walked outside that morning, the air in my lungs left and I let out a cry that I've never audibly heard from myself. And I saw things before my eyes that you can never prepare yourself for. I was certain hundreds of people had lost their lives. There was not a tree untouched. All of them snapped in half or completely uprooted. And coming from South Georgia, we live in a place, like I said, that's peppered with hundreds of pine trees everywhere you look. My vinyl fence that I was so proud of was mostly gone. A new golf cart home that I had just built. Luckily, my teens, they wanted to go hang out. So I live in like a little golf cart community. And my 14 and 15 year old took the babies and so they went and socialized with their friends about 8 o'clock the night before, and we were all like, it's not going to be a bad storm. And they didn't park the golf cart underneath the golf cart house. And usually that would result in me in their ear complaining. But that day I was so glad because a tree went through our entire golf cart home. And guys, the. The damage that I have was so small compared to what I would later see. My mom lives about a mile from me in our little community, and so I put the babies in the stroller and I was like, I'm going to walk to them. I walked outside and every neighbor was in their yard. People were going in homes checking to make sure that people were alive. Two trees were on the home in front of mine, seven trees in my pastor's home a block away. And when I tell you it was an apocalyptic scene that I have never experienced, that's the only way I can describe it. But what this podcast is about is a moment like I shared in the beginning of the story, A moment that alters your life forever. Like the first moment I heard my baby girl cry and I got to hold her in my arms and I whispered the words to her, you're gonna have the best life. It was in that moment that I changed as a woman. I became better, I became different. I had a daughter now, one that was half me. One that became my reason to want more for my life again and altered what the next three years would look like for me. And in a way, what Hurricane Helene did for our community did that. The moment I walked outside into a whole new world was the moment where I no longer saw individuals. We were all the same. We were humanity. We started looking for ways to help, to serve, to love, to listen, to be grateful. Because I wasn't prepared for the storm. I had not even taken out cash from the bank. And I don't know if you know this, but without power, that little plastic card that you carry holds absolutely no value. Here I am a mother of four with some sandwich meat, some breads and bottle of water, and no cash. None. We walked around and people's golf carts at that time were still working because they had charge on them or they were able to get gas. But as the days went on, that became very few. We didn't hear the sounds of golf carts for weeks. So we walked. We went to check on people. My boyfriend and I walked around right after the storm. And I'm going to upload the video of that onto my Instagram today if you want to go check it out to see exactly what it was that we saw. I ran into someone from my church, and she said, casey, I know you have kids. Do you need cash? Walk with me inside and let me give you and your family money. I thought, who does that? Who says, come inside, let me give you money to take care of your family. And while I didn't accept it, that moment touched my soul in so many ways, and it allowed me to see people for who they truly are. People are good. I've seen it, I've felt it, and I still am watching it unfold. We live in a world divided by politics, religion, hurt, when in reality, we are all just people searching for the same thing. Safety, security, and happiness. I want to challenge you today to truly think about the things that make you happy. Not having a phone or power or Internet for weeks on end made me disgusted at the places that we choose to spend our time. Our phones are our biggest source of unhappiness, and I know it now, to be certain, if I'm being honest, they hold such a small point of value in our lives and yet have so much power over us. My biggest monetary dreams and my biggest hopes of what is the silly thing that the world calls notoriety on the Internet. In that moment, everything shifted, and my focus now is this simple question. How can I be happier today than I was yesterday? How can I serve others, serve God, find my light, help set my soul and other people's soul on fire, in love so big that I am unafraid of tomorrow. Because as cheesy as it sounds, sometimes tomorrow never comes. But yet we forget that. I know the night of Hurricane Helene that I was safe. I knew God had my family and me and his arms. I heard him whisper in my ear, cherish every single moment and never forget that the safest moments without distractions with the people that we love are when we are our happiest. That is happiness. Nothing more, nothing less. So my goal for today's show was not marketing related, but hopefully a breath of fresh air about what life is truly about. As you move into this season of gratitude here in the States, we're going to celebrate Thanksgiving next week, and I just want to remind you, as you sit around the table with the people that you love and as you hopefully say a prayer to, truly be grateful for every single moment that you are given on this earth. Because we never truly know what tomorrow looks like. Thanks so much for listening. I know I've said it before, but I'll say it again. I love you. And I am so grateful to have each and every one of you in my life. As always, remember, your best is yet to come. And I'll see you next week.