What Would You Do If You Won the Lottery?

Kitchen & Conversation is where food meets reflection. Each recipe we share carries a story, and each story carries a question. The meals are real, the conversations are lived, and together they invite us to taste what happens when hospitality becomes a practice of imagination and presence.

What Would You Do If You Won the Lottery? This week, we bought lottery tickets—Mega Millions, Powerball. We laughed and imagined what we’d do with a billion dollars.

And then, twice in the same week, someone asked: “What’s your real job? What do you do for living?”

That question stayed with us. Because if you’re still wondering, it means we’ve made the impossible look easy. And maybe it’s time to say this part out loud.

The B. Street Family Dinner? That was Phase One. The UnMuted Series? Phase One. Turning our home into sanctuary, a refuge, a gathering place for many—that’s still Phase One.

And because we do it masterfully, it can feel invisible. But invisible doesn’t mean effortless.

So if you want to know what we’d do with a billion dollars, the dream is already mapped:

Phase Two – Expansion. Grow the Garden of Minds. Deepen the Circle Keepers path. Scale the dinners. Strengthen UnMuted regionally. Hire staff. Pay artists what they deserve. Take the weight off four shoulders.

Phase Three – The Tide. Secure a permanent home in Little Rock. Classrooms, performance and wellness halls, hospitality hubs. Expand UnMuted nationally. Grow The Vanguard into a leadership movement with roots and reach.

That’s what we’d do with a billion. And that’s what we’re already doing—without it. Which means you’ve been living inside a lottery all along.

Now, about those dinners.

We’ve done over 75. At first glance, that looks like 75 plates. But each dinner averaged 17 people.

That’s over 1,200 meals. And if you count the courses—three to five each time— you’re looking at nearly 4,000 plates from this one kitchen.

If you didn’t realize it was that many? It’s because we made it look easy. That’s what mastery does.

If you didn’t realize you were sitting in a think tank? It’s because discernment made it look easy. That’s what vision does.

From one living room, we’ve been running a restaurant, a sanctuary, and an ideas factory. Most people would call that impossible. We call it Sunday.

So when people ask what our “real jobs” are, here’s the answer: hospitality is infrastructure. Creativity is leadership. Community is currency.

This is the work. This is the lottery. And you’ve been living inside it without ever needing to buy a ticket.

At dinner, the table filled with talk of that question: what would you do if you had a billion dollars?

Someone imagined building a neighborhood with a grocery store where none existed. Another spoke of securing loved ones, making sure they were safe and resourced.

The air hummed with possibility.

Then one voice asked a sharper question: what do you think I want?

The answer came quickly—“you want people to listen to you.”

The room laughed at first, because of course that seemed true. But then came the twist: how much money would it take to buy that?

Could you purchase listening with radio airtime, with billboards, with PR? Even if you spent a billion dollars, would that guarantee a single person truly listening?

The table grew quiet. The question had done its work.

Maybe wealth isn’t only what we wait to win, but what we already carry.

The gift of listening. The choice to value someone’s song, someone’s story, someone’s presence—without asking them to prove their worth.

A song sung at the right time. A story told around the table. A meal that nourishes more than the body.

These are lotteries when we stop seeing them as ordinary.

So the question lingers: What would you do if you won the lottery? And perhaps the deeper one: What if you already have?