Dates and Dreamers

Hank still likes to surprise me every once in a while. When we were dating, I was horrible about surprises. I don't know if it was coincidence, my genius sleuthing skills(bahaa!) or just friends with loose lips, but I managed to ruin almost every surprise he planned.

  I would fret and worry that the surprise wouldn't turn out well or that he needed my help but I couldn't give it because... well, it was a surprise. I have gotten a bit more trusting and a little more relaxed. Turns out life is more fun that way!

    So Hank told me mid-week that he wanted to surprise me with a date on Saturday. I said ok and he proceeded to tell me to be ready by 2:00pm.

   Saturday rolled around after a tough week at school and I was extremely thankful for a thoughtful husband. We needed to get out and have some fun.

   We spent the morning around the house- he changing the oil and mowing the lawn while I did laundry and looked up recipes :). We piled into the cars and headed off. Would you know that my hubby found an online coupon and took me to a historic home tour?!

    On our anniversary weekend we planned out our dreams for the next five years. Since then, we have been planning and plotting and looking into seeing those dreams happen. One of those dreams is to fix up a foreclosure and then sell it for profit. This is more of a stepping stone to other dreams, but we love to work together on projects and Hank is super Handy.. Hmm.. Handy Hank. Hank the Handyman... I like it.

    We walked through houses built in the early 1930's and talked about our favorite kitchens, flowers and bookshelves. Old Houses are so neat and these had been well-loved. We took pictures and made notes and gathered valuable gardening advice. We even scored some homemade honey from one of the home owners and I filled my purse with the pecans that covered the sidewalks.

   After we finished the tour, Hank took me to a pizza food truck near down town. He had cleverly found another coupon and this little food truck served vegan pizza! This month we are going vegan- more on that later.

   We grabbed our pizza and dashed to Discovery Green to eat.

    Lately God has been teaching us about food. It started when I watched Forks Over Knives. In that documentary, I was so challenged by the idea of eating a plant based diet. We love green veggies and we have a fairly natural diet to begin with- but I have no problem splurging on sweets and Hank tends to eat a lot of meat. So we decided to go for it and see how we felt eating vegan for a month.

   I love the idea that I am cutting out cholesterol, eating sustainable food, and perhaps downsizing my massive carbon footprint (I have a jeep...)

   All in all, it has been so easy. That may be because I cheat every once in a while (mmmm Donut holes...) but the vegan food we have cooked thus far has been DELICIOUS. No lie. It has been epic. Vegan fajitas, black bean salsa with beet chips, vegan crepes. Yummy! And it is absolutely guiltless because it is natural.

    So, Hank and I grabbed our vegan pizza and headed to the park. Discovery Green is located in downtown Houston and it is an urban green space that hosts free shows, movies and has the coolest fountain and jungle gym for kids to play on.

We saw that there was a movie on the lawn when we arrived. We hadn't intended to go to this park but it was the one that the guy at the pizza place suggested. Would you like to know what the movie was about????

God is so cool.


It was about meat production in America and how our system needs to change. It wasn't a Peta production with graphic pictures. I can't handle that. It was an honest look at the problems within our commodity oriented animal industry. Cheap meat has become the goal- rather than good quality or animal welfare. And one of the main groups of people who are suffering are farmers. Farmers who have to raise a huge amount of chickens in a highly technological way to ensure that they make a small profit. Farmers who have been indentured to big companies because the industry is set up in such a way that the farmer incurs all the risk and the farmer loses all if the demand for meat decreases. In the video, farmers were interviewed and a solution was presented. More people need to farm but the farms need to be smaller.

   Hank and I never pictured we would want to farm. I still can't say I am too terribly excited about pigs, but the concepts presented in the movie were so simple and just like what my grandparents did. It just made sense.

   One of the dreams that Hank and I have is to open a cafe that serves locally grown food, provides and warm place for people to sit and talk and a venue for local Christian artists and sell art and have concerts. We love people, we love food, we love the arts. And we love working together.

But we also want to teach our kids to work and work hard. I don't want my kids to grow up spending hours in front of a tv or computer. I want them to be so tired at the end of a day that they can't get into trouble :). I want them to learn to work hard and play hard. You see, these are core values in my family. My grandparents knew how to work hard but they also knew how to relax and their family and friends were always the top priority.

So God has been planting ideas and dreams and last night my mind was just too active to allow sleep. So I wrote out some of those dreams and allowed God to begin to give me a vision. And He did. And it was great.

   I know anything can happen tomorrow. In East Texas, where I went to school, they would say they would do something "Lord Willing and the Creek don't rise."  Lord willing, we would like to open a cafe and raise all the food to supply it. Lord willing, we want to spend our time out in God's creation, witnessing the miracles of seeds that die to provide life giving nutrients and witnessed the miracles of relationships and feeding people's hungry tummys and trusting God for what we need.