We moved to Fort Lauderdale, FL on August 1, 2011. This was a move that had been in the "works" for quite a while. Some friends of ours started a church in May of 2006 and had been "pestering" us to move down and help them. I, personally, was not inclined to move anywhere. I liked where we lived, my sisters lived in town, and my parents weren't far away either. Leigh's family was only a days drive away and one of his brothers had just moved down.
Everything I had ever heard about Fort Lauderdale was bad. "It's a wicked city", "there's blatant "sin" ", "there's awful stores on every street corner", etc. I'm also not a big fan of large cities and interstate driving to get to where I want to go. Some other questions consisted of How do I shelter and protect my children the way I think I should, when there's other kids in the church who aren't taught to not use certain words, hand gestures, etc., or Will there be any kids in the church so my kids will even Have friends?, etc. etc..I don't know Your friends very well, I don't know anybody, etc.. I also had other questions, concerns, complaints, mostly excuses, as to why we Should Not move.
Of course I didn't know I had all these excuses, until my dear Leigh tells me one day in September of 2006 on our way home after Sunday night church, that he thought God wanted us to move to Fort Lauderdale. So, out came my "reasons" about why it was not a good idea and why we shouldn't move. I wasn't totally against it, to the point of saying , "No, I'm not going" I just wanted him to be sure and to hear my reasons as to why I didn't want to. We decided to test the waters so to speak and go down and visit and show our support for our friends endeavor. So we went down in October of 2006, saw their house, saw the church, met the people-the few that were there, went to a youth activity at the beach, rode the church van, attended a service with the pastor, his wife, and I think 4 or 5 other people.
We came home and I said, "When do we pack??" and Leigh said, "No, we're not supposed to move down there now." (We also went down in December of 2009, just to visit) So after that, every December, I asked Leigh if he would be resigning his contract in January, or if this would be the year that we would move. Well, last year, in October 2010, Leigh told me that he felt this year was the year that God wanted us to come down to Fort Lauderdale and try to be a help to his friend. So we waited until after contract signing came and went, because we wanted to make sure there weren't any red flags, to say for sure that we were moving. Our house went on the market in March and had a signed contract in May, even with the allowance that we would like to stay in it until the end of July; came to Lauderdale the second week of July to find somewhere to rent, signed a rent contract the day we left Lauderdale to come back to Pensacola, and moved down a week later, and closed on our house on Aug 8. So that is the where, when, how, and why we ended up down here. We both have a complete peace that this is where we are supposed to be. We're excited about what God's doing in our lives and in the church. And it's been neat to see how God has worked everything out so far. Since this has been rather long, I'll wait to share some other things for another post. :)
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