“Sorry, I’m not,” I said.

“Matthew twenty-five, verses thirty-five and thirty-six, sums up our entire philosophy. Jesus said, ‘I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me . . . Whatever you did to the least of these, you did to me.’ That’s how we live our lives, and it’s the closest thing we have to a creed.”

It was hard to find fault with that. Not nearly as juicy as Leo and I might have secretly hoped. “So how does that work? Practically speaking.” It sounded beautiful and poetic, but I wanted to know how that played out in day-to-day life.

He folded his hands on the top of the desk. “We live our lives as servants of Christ.”

It still didn’t tell me anything significant. Not anything that I couldn’t read in one of the pamphlets stacked next to their front door. I shifted gears. “Were you always this into helping people?”

“Absolutely not. I stumbled upon it purely by mistake and divine intervention,” he said.

I spent the next hour listening to him describe how he’d grown up extremely poor on a small farm in rural New Jersey. He started working when he was nine and never stopped, going on to become a successful stockbroker as an adult. He described how he was living the American dream until one day on his commute home he started questioning his happiness. It led him to go in search of greater meaning. It seemed a bit cliché to me, and my thoughts drifted as he continued explaining how he gave his money away to various charities. He had started with giving possessions to homeless people on the streets and had ended with allowing families from domestic violence shelters to move into the three houses he owned across the country.

“I’ve never looked back,” he said after he finished.

“Not even once?”

He shook his head. “There was always a measure of unrest and emptiness in my soul. I spent my life ignoring it and pretending like it wasn’t there. This way of life has not only taken away those feelings, but it’s allowed me to stop living a lie and to step into a life of authenticity. The greatest riches in the world never gave me that,” he said.

I did my best to keep a straight face and not show my annoyance. The only people who ever complained about having all kinds of money and not being happy were the ones who had it. One of the reasons I was so glad to be back at work was that Scott and I could stop fighting about money. We’d been arguing about money since Abbi was born, and we’d never been ones to fight about our finances. All that had changed when we had gone down to nearly a one-income family, but Scott refused to admit that was why we were struggling so hard. It was too big of a hit to his ego that he couldn’t support us in the way we’d been used to on just his income alone.