For the next 18 weeks we are going to talk about money. Probably not the way you are expecting.

You do not need the book. You do not need to know anything about finance. You do not need to have your financial life together.

Tonight we are not starting with budgets or spreadsheets. We are starting with your heart, and with the house you grew up in.

The story follows eight college students, a finance professor, and a janitor named Clyde who has been quietly listening to finance lectures while he empties the trash cans.

Tonight you meet Noah, who walks in suspicious of the whole thing. Madison, who has it all together on the outside. And Berkeley, who is at the bank asking for forty seven thousand dollars with his mama's trailer as collateral.

If you have the book, this is Chapter 1. If you do not, just listen. You will not be behind.

Read verse 21 slowly. It is one of those verses we have heard so many times that we quit hearing it.

Watch which direction the sentence runs.

You do not fund what you love. You end up loving what you fund.

Which means you do not fix your heart by trying harder to feel differently about money. You move the money, and the heart comes along behind it.

Your family background, your values, and your fears shape your financial decisions before you ever run a number.

Somebody grew up where money was tight and never discussed. Somebody grew up where there was plenty and no plan. Somebody watched a parent get wiped out.

Nobody sat you down and taught you those. You absorbed them. They were installed before you were old enough to agree to them.

A steward is a manager. He handles real money, makes real decisions, has real authority. And he owns none of it.

As an owner, the question is how do I get more, how do I keep it, is it enough. That question has no floor and no ceiling. You will never once answer it.

This one you can answer. Tonight. With whatever you have got.

No name on the card. Not the polite version. The real one.

It might be one word. It might fill the card. Nobody will ask you to tell the room what you wrote.

A few words about what you want money to do in your life. Not a number. A direction.

Peace in my house. Free of this debt by the time she graduates. Generous like my grandmother was.

One more to chew on. If your heart follows your money, what is one small dollar that could move this week?