I remember all of the nights lying in bed… church planting a seemingly far-stretched thought, yet we could never get away from it. We would vision cast and bounce ideas off of each other. We would talk about the kind of culture that we could best reach, the people that we could relate to, and the kinds of activities that we enjoyed. We knew all of these things were so important regarding the location where we would plant a church, if for no other reasons than we wanted to see ourselves in a place where we could live for a long while, raise our children, and truly become part of it.

Some people like to golf, some like to hunt, but my husband likes to fish, and most of all, he likes to saltwater fish. We decided that coastal living sounded just like our speed. So on one of these late nights, we pulled out a map and decided that we would like to live somewhere between the coast of South Carolina… all the way down and wrapped around the state of Florida… to halfway over to the coastal border of Texas.

Being the research, statistical nerd that I am, I immediately began researching every major city along this coastline – population density, school ratings, number of churches, median household income, industry base, median age, educational background, and much more.

Then we started praying…

The draw came in many different ways… a random postcard to visit Tampa, a news spot about an aquarium in Sarasota, a man at Hershey’s Chocolate World who worked in the 3D Movie who was from Tampa, a phone call from a resort trying to sell us a timeshare in Tampa, an ice skater I was following was from St. Petersburg… so we had to check it out. We knew we had to somehow make a visit.

And we felt like the Tampa area might just be it.

Jacqueline