Little House Near The Dairy

• Many ideas and experiences are converging in one place and time.
• God talks about taking care of widows and orphans in their time of need. I believe that single parent families are overlooked as being in this category. Death might take a spouse or partner suddenly, but divorce or separation adds the additional emotional pain of not being loved or wanted.
• In the city, people are surrounded by the work of man – cars, building parking lots, capitalism. It’s healthy to get away from this and reset.
• Vision came for Hope Canyon when I started asking how to put these two ideas together
• I started asking God where and when.
• Learned from single parents and other sources that a two or three year window is what it takes to get someone off government assistance and on their own two feet.
• While visiting my parents in San Antonio, I traveled down Hwy 281 because I liked the country and the slower pace. I got to go through a little town called Hamilton, and something about it tugged at me. Knowing that these tugs should be followed, I started looking for a place in Hamilton to locate Hope Canyon.
• I visited a 65-acre piece of property where the farmer and his wife were just too old to farm anymore. They told me about how great Hamilton was, to the point that grow children were now moving back to start families and businesses. The churches seemed to be good at working together to help the poor.
• After deciding that this was not the place, I drove through Dublin on the way home. We had been there with a group of kids from the Children’s Home we had worked at before. This time, it was just us.
• After getting home, I found that out of the 3800 residents in Dublin, 31% of them lived below the poverty line.
• Late in 2008, God told me that 2008 had been a taxi-out year, and to be ready to take off.
• I was encouraged to go where the need was. Hamilton did not have the level of poverty that Dublin did.
• In the meantime, I moved into the suburbs to be close to church for a year, to better participate in the children’s ministry there. The burbs and I did not play well together.
• In January of 2009, I started looking for a house in Dublin. That’s when we met our realtor, when we went to look at a 3-acre place.
• Later that year, she called us with a house lead. It was “the” place: 5-bed, 2-story, 2 full bath, big office, on 2 acres.
• Once we were 60% packed, we beagn wondering where the other 40% came from.
• I have been blessed with a family that wants to really live! they are my adventurers, helpers, and servants to all. We’re eager to start this new chapter together, and help as many as we can!