We are Greg & Lisa Engel.  We met, fell madly in love, and got married 26 years ago. We have been running our own little business for about 8 years now. Backflow testing and repair with a home repair business on the side (– or maybe the other way around??). We praise God from whom all blessings flow, for without God we would be nothing and have nothing. Our bills are paid (mostly on time), our older kids, Samantha and Adam have jobs but still live at home (a story for another day), Simon is 16 and a sophomore at VHS (willing to work with Pops), a couple of dogs, 2 bootleg chickens, and a Ford F-150 that is paid for. We still live in town in our lovely little cape cod that has a few issues but is in pretty good shape, over all. We love our church, we have many friends (some of them are even close friends), we have good relationships with our parents and in general we feel that we are happier now than at any other time in our lives that we can remember.
We are not skinny people, nor are we unhealthy people, we do not believe (despite what the government and most western doctors would say) that those two things are necessarily related. In other words, while those things are correlated in some studies one is not the cause of another.
For the last 12 years or so we have really been trying to eat better and educate ourselves on what we should be putting in our bodies. It started out by NOT eating any trans-fats, and moved onto no high fructose corn syrup, cutting down on our white flour (very hard), and increasing our garden size every year for the last four years. Lisa preserves as much as she can and increases that every year. We have begun acquiring as much locally produced food as we can, that includes our beef, pork, chicken, eggs, real milk, honey and most of our vegetables. For now we still have to go to the grocery store for what we can’t find locally.
We have always said we would like to have our own farm someday. We both love the outdoors, fresh air, the animals, the hard work and the independence of being your own boss. Our local food gathering sparked an interest for us in HOW that food is grown, treated and processed. In our attempts to educate ourselves we were introduced to many farmers and methods and frankly some of these were not what we wanted. We both said to each other that WE could do this if only we had a place of our own, but that seemed liked too much to ask God for until…it didn’t seem like too much. Lisa keeps telling me nothing is too big for God.
So, here we are at the beginning of an awesome, exciting, scary, fantastic, overwhelming adventure with this as our prayer,
Lord, God, you have called your servants to ventures of which we cannot see the ending, by paths as yet untrodden, through perils unknown. Give us faith to go out with good courage, not knowing where we go, but only that your hand is leading us and your love supporting us; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen