About Us
We are a husband and wife team. I’m Don Johnson…the original…not the Miami Vice or Nash Bridges fellow. That Don Johnson did graduate from the same high school as my wife, Beth. I retired from LifeWay Christian Resources in 2006 and looked for ways to build an income using the internet. I ran across the Site Build It! web site, purchased the subscription. My wife already had an idea for a web site, so I encouraged her to go ahead. The result is the one you are now viewing. I’ll let her tell you her story. My name is Beth Johnson. My husband has always been my greatest encourager. I’m a retired teacher of students with visual impairments. My journey in this fascinating field actually began when I was a child. No, I’m not visually impaired. But the grandmother of my best friend was. She was blind. I believe this early exposure to someone with a disability had a profound effect on my life. Stories about Helen Keller and Laura Bridgman captured my interest and whetted my appetite to learn more. As a second grade teacher (many years ago), I taught a unit on our senses. I asked the students to image being without sight. My deep interest in the subject must have been apparent to my students. The mother of one told me that her daughter was walking around the house with her eyes closed trying to imagine blindness.
Stints as a substitute teacher and a para-professional at the Tennessee School for the Blind only crystalized the determination to earn a vision endorsement. So at age 56, and with the unwavering support of my husband, I enrolled in the Summer Vision Institute at Middle Tennessee State University to pursue my dream. That fall, when only half-way through the two-summer course, Rutherford County Tennessee hired me provisionally as an itinerant teacher. The provision? That I would complete the course. Of course I would complete it; it was my goal!What better way to experience the whole gamut of the field of visual impairment than as an itinerant. I traveled throughout the county working in all the schools where there were students with visual impairments. The students ranged from multiply impaired to gifted. From totally blind to just visually impaired enough to meet the criteria for certification. These students taught me so much. The most important thing they taught? Whatever enriches the lives of these students actually enriches ALL students. So much of this web site draws on the invaluable things I learned in working with these challenging—in a positive way, but wonderful students. Someone else who captures my interest and involvement is our granddaughter. She, as much as anyone, actually birthed the idea for the web site. Interacting with my granddaughter and children with disabilities has made me realize that children are a gift from God. Even those with disabilities? Yes! Maybe especially those because they challenge and confront us more acutely with the realization that without His help, and those He brings into our lives, we are weak and needy. And yet, as I look back over our own child-rearing years, I’m struck by the fact that rearing children, with or without disabilities, points us to the need for help beyond our own abilities. God has given us His Word, the best child-rearing manual on the market.
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