ONE SHEET

 STORYLINE & SCRIPT SUMMARY                                         

The phrase “Getting Home” carries with it an innate sense of comfort, even a feeling of completion, in every human being.  Young and old, every color and creed, try to find a place that they can call home.  This sense of “home” is a place that one can run to whenever they feel unsafe. It is a place where one can retreat to when they feel a sense of loss, tragedy, and any other unsettling situation in life. 

Martha Yancey Garner was an extraordinary woman who endured tragedy, trial, heartache, and suffering in almost every area of her life.  In response, she would continue to go “home.” She continued to find her “home” place.  This place of peace, comfort and security took many different forms in her life.  At the age of three, she was rescued by her brother, beside a busy highway, from being hit by an 18-wheel transfer truck.  He grabbed her skirt, she fell into the grass, began to cry, and just wanted to go “home.”  After years of being a pageant queen in high school and an “Auburn Beauty” at Auburn University, she met a man in a sporty white corvette and thought that they would marry and create together the perfect sense of the word “home.”  After they graduated from Auburn University and married in 1963, this dream seemed to be attainable at first; but, within a year of being married, he was deployed by the U.S. Army to Seoul, South Korea for a year of active duty.  When Jim came back home, he worked for a while as an accountant, but then began to start a building a hardware store.  They started trying to have a family and after four years got pregnant with their first baby, Kelly.  Kelly Kristy was born in August of 1967 and they began to build what Martha thought would be the ideal family and “home.”  They kept trying to have another child; but, even with help from fertility experts around the country, Kelly would (at least for now) be their only child.

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In 1970, she was teaching at a regional community college as an instructor of mathematics, with her mother, Elise Yancey, chair of the math department.  They got a call while teaching one day that her brother Charles had been in a serious accident on the farm.  A tractor he was driving had tipped backwards when he was lifting a heavy load of mud and had fallen on top of him, trapping him underneath it and catching on fire.  She and her mother left immediately, picking up her father from his job at Goodyear Tire and Rubber.  On the way home, her Dad kept asking why they had not seen an ambulance coming down the mountain from the farm.  They arrived to see Charles lying on the ground deceased and covered by a white sheet.  Her brother, Charles, was the same one who had saved her from running out onto the busy highway as a three-year-old. 

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As she began to grieve for her brother, she threw herself into her family at home, trying to be the wife and mother that she needed to be.  She and her husband, Jim, started trying to have another child.  After finding out that she was unable to have more children, the emotional bond she had with Jim began to change and they stopped sleeping in the same bed.  She began to realize that the perfect “home” that she always thought she would have was beginning to look like a fairy tale that would never come to pass.  At this point, she realized she had to find a way to create a “home” for her baby girl, even though it might not be the same kind of family atmosphere that she had been raised in.  She would go frequently to see her parents at the "homeplace" with Baby Kelly in tow.  Her husband, Jim, would go with them on Christmas Day and went on a few vacation trips as a family through the years; but, Martha began to realize that he was not terribly interested in planning family vacations.  So, she began to plan trips to the beach and many other places with her daughter.  Over the next few years, she learned that her husband's childhood was dysfunctional and they never really took any kind of family vacations.  Jim’s mother would frequently send him, on his bicycle at the age of eight years old, to pull his own father out of the bar at 2:00 or 3:00am in the middle of the night.  Jim’s father would have been there most of the night playing poker, getting drunk, and playing billiards.  Jim's daddy became a Christian later in life, at 55, and after doing so, did nothing but sit and read his bible.  But nonetheless, Jim's childhood years had been difficult, not being raised in a nurturing Christian family atmosphere.

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Martha had been raised in a strong Christian home and became a believer at a young age, being led to Christ by her older brother.  Her parents were bible-believing, deeply spiritual people who demonstrated their faith by the way they lived. The more trips she would make back to her homeplace to spend time with her parents, the more she began to talk to her Daddy about the bible.  He had been a Sunday School teacher for many years at Mt. Olive Baptist Church, a small church on top of Sand Mountain in Alabama.  Her Daddy had spent many years digging into the truth of God’s Word from cover to cover.  She began to take her daughter, Kelly, and spend almost every Friday night with her parents in their home.  She started to realize that no matter what the circumstances were, the Word of God made her feel like she was “home.”  Living in-between the pages of the Word of God and breathing it out in daily life was a sense of “home” that would surpass any trial or suffering she might encounter.  She eventually set up a special place in her house where she spent many hours at her dining room table with her bible and Sunday School lesson laid open continually.  This was a place where she could retreat and find her sense of “home.”  She taught a Sunday School class at First Baptist Church in their small town of Piedmont, Alabama and enjoyed the preparation and study that her weekly teaching required of her.   

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Martha’s daily regimen was to cook, clean, do dishes, do laundry, serve meals and sit the plates on the table in front of the family.  In the midst of carrying out her duties as a wife and mother, she continued to hold down her teaching job, but had a little help from a friend.  This friend to the family, Amanda Griffie, would keep her baby girl from morning till afternoon  before she got home from teaching all day.  One evening in the spring of 1989, Amanda was shot and killed by her husband, who dealt with a mental disorder for many years.  He killed her with a shotgun, a shot to the neck and one to the heart, as she sat quietly at home on the couch watching television.  Once again, Martha had to endure a tragic loss, but retreated to the place in her “home” where the Word of God continued to lay open and provide her with her only place of peace. 

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The atmosphere around the house was somewhat normal as long as Jim was allowed to watch the stock market, Fox News and get his meals, his insulin, or anything else he needed or wanted it.  But, if things did not go as he wanted, he would yell and lash out irrationally towards his family, including his impressionable baby girl.  The love, emotional bond, and compassion that is normally in a marriage between a man and wife was not present.  But nonetheless, Martha tried to make the “home” as normal as possible for her only child.  She would do her duties as cook, cleaning lady, laundry maid and then retreat to her study of the Word of God whenever she got through with her work around 8:00 or 9:00pm every night.  She had a few hobbies that she would occasionally get her out of the house like oil painting, watercolor painting, and china painting.  She had an art teacher, Faye Neely in Trafford, AL, where she and her mother and even little baby Kelly would often go for an art lesson together.  Her family received many of these original artwork treasures through the years as gifts for Christmas and birthdays.  During the last six to eight years of her life, this activity that gave her an escape would occur less often as she aged. 

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In 1996, Martha was on a trip with her daughter who was a gospel recording artist.  Her daughter had been asked to perform at a youth conference in Mississippi.  After they arrived at their long-time pastor friends’ house and had gone to bed, they were awakened with a phone call the next morning at 4:30am.  That phone call was from Jim, telling Martha that her homeplace was on fire and they could not find her parents.  The fire had been spotted by passing trucks and it was said to have had flames as high as 40 feet above the roof line.  When Martha got the phone call, she passed out across a bed, but Kelly quickly got her packed, into the car, and drove them back to Alabama.  Along the way, they kept praying, sometimes singing, and were on the phone trying to find out if her parents had been found as the house continued to burn for hours.  At some point along the way, they said they had found her father in his bed and his heart was still beating, but Martha knew that it might just be his pacemaker.  Emergency Medical Services told Martha that they could not find her mother and thought that she might be lost somewhere in the woods behind the house.  Martha and Kelly both knew that could not be true about a woman that was brilliant enough to teach Advance Calculus and Differential Equations.  At some point on their trip back, when they started to sing, they knew Martha’s parents had passed.  It was as if God had told them Himself.  When they arrived at the homeplace in Alabama, Martha’s parents were indeed deceased and the house, her homeplace, was burned to the ground.  She and her daughter, Kelly, stood on the front lawn and looked at her childhood home, seeing a place that was burned to the very foundation, completely destroyed.  They stood there in shock with tears streaming down their faces.  Friends from all over began to gather there on the front lawn to console them.  This home was truly a special place where they had celebrated every Christmas Day since Kelly was a baby.

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After a few days, the Martha and Kelly went back to the homeplace, trying to find anything they could.  They found a few broken pieces of glass and china, but the one thing Martha found in the ash was her Daddy’s bible.  It was a leather-bound bible that he had used for years.  The interesting thing about her special find was that the leather was completely scorched, but when you opened it up, the edges of all the pages were burnt, but only up to the edge of the words, up to the edge of the scripture, on each page.  Martha clung to this find because it took her back to the days when she would go home and talk to her Daddy about the Word and all the promises God had given us in scripture.  Kelly, her daughter, still has this copy of Martha’s Daddy’s bible.  While digging through the ash that day, Kelly heard the Lord say to her, “This is all brokenness, but I am your Hope!”  Martha knew that her parents had finally found their eternal home and were with Jesus.  They both knew they had to let all those material things go and try to keep walking forward.  As Martha’s mother would say to her many times after teaching all day, “did you make a difference today?”  Martha, being the steel magnolia that she was, knew that she needed to keep walking forward, trying to “make a difference” in the world.

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After the fire, her daughter cancelled the rest of her promotional tour and moved back to Alabama to be with her mother, where they could grieve together.  They helped each other by walking in the subdivision every day and repeating special scriptures to each other, confirming the hope they had in Jesus.  Kelly says that during that time, she would see her mother sitting at the dining table in her home, in that quiet place.  She would always have her hand on her bible and would sometimes be seen looking out the window, whispering a prayer. She would often also be seen sitting there with tears streaming down her face.  It was during this time that Kelly wrote one of her songs, “In the Silence,” which became popular with many family and friends.  Kelly recorded this song years later, but it was not released until 2025.  After two years of living in Alabama, Kelly moved back to the Nashville area to resume her work in the music industry and started teaching for Belmont University.  Martha continued her role as wife and Sunday School teaching, while also serving on the Piedmont City School Board and was a volunteer at the Right to Life organization in Gadsden, AL. She continued through the years to make her house a “home,” but started studying and teaching more about prayer than ever before.  After she retired from teaching, she began to have even more time to devote to bible study and prayer.  Many times when approached by others about how to handle adversity, she would use the phrase “Just Say Father,” referring to the promise of being able to call upon the name of the Lord for anything we might need.  This phrase was also turned into a song and recorded by her daughter, Kelly, in 2025 as a part of this soundtrack.  Her devotion to prayer was only confirmed in her heart when she had the opportunity to be a counselor for the Billy Graham Crusade in Nashville in 2000.  Being given the chance to be a part of that crusade and lead others to Christ in that huge stadium, was a great thrill for her.  She had seen how prayer had helped her through the worst of life’s circumstances and wanted others to know her Savior. 

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In 2019, her daughter, having been diagnosed with epilepsy a few years earlier, was traveling on an interstate back home to Nashville and passed out at the wheel.  As her vehicle veered off the highway, it hit a ditch on the side of the interstate, throwing the van up into the air thirty feet and landing down in a ravine.  Miraculously, Kelly was found alive in the car by a driver traveling behind her who witnessed the accident.  He pried open the door of the vehicle and helped Kelly up the embankment, through the trees and shrubs, to an EMS vehicle waiting on the road above them.  When Martha and Jim got the phone call, Martha began to pray there at home in her special place.  She knew all about the power of prayer because it had gotten her through every tragedy and trial she had ever encountered.  She knew Kelly’s epilepsy and the wreck was serious; but, knew about the promises God had given her in the Word and cried out for God to “take care of her baby.”

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A couple years later in 2021, Martha began to experience some issues with AFib, a condition she had being dealing with for many years.  She had gotten a pacemaker installed several years before, but something still wasn’t right.  She began to gain fluid that seemed to be more than usual. In the Spring of 2022, Kelly took a nurse friend with her to her childhood home to visit her parents.  When Kelly’s friend saw her mother, she told Kelly that her mother was carrying 20-30lbs of extra fluid just in her back and that they had better get her to a doctor fast.  They took her to a doctor the following Monday morning and he admitted Martha to the hospital to try to reduce the fluid she was carrying.  Kelly’s nurse friend told her that she was afraid it was about to spill over into her lungs.  The hospital staff were able to reduce the fluid somewhat and Martha was able to go “home” again.  She was in the hospital again several times throughout the summer where the doctors were trying to reduce fluid, while also trying to maintain her kidney health.  Every time Martha was in the hospital, she kept wanting to go “home.”  She hated hospitals, hated needles, and just wanted to get back home.  At the end of August 2022, she went into the hospital with more fluid than they had ever seen and her kidney function had fallen.  She went through Covid, Pneumonia, declining kidney function, declining liver function, and finally had to go through surgery to install a port for kidney dialysis.  She had to be transported to dialysis three to four times per week for about a month.  Her daughter, Kelly, stayed with her, sleeping in a recliner, the entire time she was in the hospital. 

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After Martha had been in the hospital about two weeks in September, she woke up one morning and asked Kelly, “Who was that big man at the end of my bed all night?”  Kelly said, “Mother, I don’t know, what did he look like?”  Martha said, “He was really big, just sat at the end of my bed.  He was strangely dressed in red and blue and he had hair all over his face.”  Kelly said, “Well, mother, what did he do all night?”  Martha said, “He just watched me.”  Kelly said, “Mother, who do you think that was?”  Martha said, “I think it was Jesus” with a big smile on her face.  Immediately Kelly responded, “Momma, I guess He was watching over you.”  Martha said, “Yes!”  About a week later, she woke up one morning and again asked her daughter a strange question, “What was my granddaddy Yancey doing over there in the corner of my room all night?”  Kelly looked over to an empty corner of the room and said, “Momma, I don’t know.  What was he doing?”  She said, “He was just sitting in a chair with a nice black tie and suit on.  He just watched me all night.”  Then Martha turned and looked at the corner of the room and said, “He’s sitting over there right now!”  Kelly was astounded because that corner of the room was completely empty, but she knew her mother had seen something.  About the middle of October, Martha woke up again one morning and Kelly began to talk to her about getting her home for Christmas and what a celebration it was going to be!  Martha sat there quietly and finally said, “My momma came to see me just last night like she did the other day.”  Kelly said, “What did you say, momma?” and pulled out the camera on her phone to video it.  Martha said it again while Kelly was videoing.  Kelly asked “What did she say to you, momma?” Martha weeping said, “Oh it’s going to be a Hallelujah Christmas!”  Kelly thinking that she was still going to take her mother “home” for Christmas said, “Oh yes, it is going to be a Hallelujah Christmas! I’m going to take you HOME!”  Hallelujah Christmas is also a song written and recorded by Kelly for this soundtrack.  Martha became septic a day later and went into a coma.  She passed on from this earthly home to her heavenly home a day later. “The Day I Get Home” for Martha Yancey Garner was October 28, 2022.  What a glorious day it must have been!  She laid down her sorrows, trials, tribulation and suffering and traded a cross for a crown.  And on that DAY, she finally found her ultimate, eternal HOME!

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The theme song to this movie (The Day I Get Home) was written in 2015 by Kelly and her friend, Amy Keffer Shellem.  The interesting part of that story is that initially they thought the song was written about Amy’s grandpa.  When Kelly’s mom died in 2022, Amy called her and said, “Kelly, our song is about your mom!”  The song became the second radio single released of Kelly’s 2023 recording, “It’s Not Over” and quickly became a hit in the southern gospel community.  Interestingly, the basic tracks for this recording were recorded at the beginning of August in 2022, just before Kelly’s mother died.  Martha was able to hear the rough tracks and Kelly’s initial vocal, but Kelly had to go back and re-record the first verse to state “With HER hand on HER bible, SHE stood throughout the years and taught the old-time gospel through all life’s toils and tears.” 

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Martha died at 4:18am and when Kelly, Jim and other family walked out of the hospital that morning, the sky was blazing red.  The second verse is written describing that scene exactly of “when the long night has ended.”  The first verse is the story of Martha’s life as a faithful servant of God “with her hand on her bible.”  Kelly sang the song at her mom’s funeral.  It is Martha’s story.  Many have now discovered the song and resonated with the story because of the radio single’s enormous success.  Now it is time to make the story into a movie and tell the world.

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Martha had written several songs in her life with her daughter, Kelly, that were recorded by various gospel artists through the years.  Some of these groups included, Brian Free & Assurance, Triumphant Quartet and Greater Vision.  The last song she wrote, “The Cross of Amazing Grace,” was written with Kelly in the hospital, in the Summer of 2022 just before Martha passed.  That song is now recorded and also a part of this soundtrack.

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