Jess and I spent the past few days in and near the town of Newnan, Georgia with her parents.  

From February 2010 (last time)

I find it interesting that the Lord might have been using the whole Mobile/Atlanta music experience, in part, to show us where we’d possibly be moving over a year later.


Anyway, my sister-in-law Alli coincidently hooked us up with Scott Whittaker, the pastor of a small church called StonePoint, which happens to also be in Newnan.  She forwarded us a job listing the church had at the time for a Worship Pastor and I don’t think she knew we had been to Newnan before.  Also, Scott is apparently  the president of Church Leader Insights, an organization which my church (and employer for the past year) takes a lot of training and insight from and applies to how the church operates.  There were far too many “stars aligning” and we felt we had to at least go back to Newnan for this trip to kind of feel it out, beyond them “stars”.

We arrived late and drove up and down the main road trying to decide where to eat.  Zaxby’s worked.  Afterwards we went to the hotel for presents (Bill Sr. and I shared a birthday a few days prior) and to enjoy special cake that Alli made, in honor of our shared enjoyment of popcorn and orange slices.  

The next morning, we went to check out StonePoint church and were amazed at how well they had their church service put together.  The music was modern and powerful, the people very friendly, the production of the service was clean and professional and the message was both very relevant and well-studied.  I was shocked at how low the attendance was, but it WAS President’s Day Weekend.  Either that was the reason, or with North Point church being a 30-40 minute drive away, perhaps the church “standard” is just ridiculous in comparison to what I’m used to.

Clip from StonePoint Church

Here’s some footage from the house exterior Monday We met the Realtor and drove all around the central areas of Newnan, where houses we were interested in are located.  Lisa was kind enough to “protect” us from all the areas we probably wouldn’t be safe or comfortable in…  which left us with the one house we saw the day before and really liked.  We drove out to that nice yellow house in Whiteserg again and started getting all kinds of ideas of what we could do to fix it up.  After walking around, standing around and talking about the house for a couple of hours, we let Lisa get back to work. Clips inside the house We drove to the nearby Cracker Barrel to calculate house price + cost to fix it up and get some ideas.  We all felt really good about the house that night so we made an offer.  We actually happened to be on the phone making the offer while we were at the same Hasting’s a second time.  Important place!  LOL. Afterwards, we went to the movies and saw the new Gulliver’s Travels.  The movie was cut short by probably 3 seconds; before the credits started to roll.  I started a mini-revolt by exclaiming something along the lines of “get our money back” or “free tickets”… which ended in just that for the 10 of us who were in the theater.  If we don’t move to Newnan, I guess we’ll at least have to visit to use 4 free movie tickets. Tuesday The next day was spent just pokin’ around the area.  We walked around downtown…

…while we were there, we had some of the best food EVER… no joke.

We stumbled upon a nearby treasure and wished we were Geochaching members

After relaxing on the river, we drove the 5 minutes over to the house we made an offer on to do some measuring and put together a bunch of plans for fixing up and modifying the place.  That night, we received a counter-offer on the house and accepted it.

Beyond
We returned home and took care of the house contract paperwork.  We’ll see what happens next… but Newnan already feels like home and we’re excited to head back and get to work on this big project.

Thanks for helping us out so much in all the multiple ways, Mom and Dad!