ROE INTENSE

My Friday evening started off on a great foot. I loaded up two medium, delicious smelling pizzas and noted the address. It was an even-number home, so north side of the street. There was a note. “ 1/2. The light is on. ” When people specify 1/2 addresses, you can bet it is either a ground level apartment or an added room on the back. I arrived near the destination. This was an easy one. A light was indeed on. It was a basement apartment in a over-under duplex. A wide gate stood open in the customer’s chain-link fence. A rough retaining wall crept along the path to her door on my left. Succulents and dormant phlox covered most of it. It was beautiful! To top it off, cactus, with it’s small red fruit, ran along the cinderblock wall of the foundation along the left side of the door. The inside door was wide open. I knocked on the outside one and counted. One one-thousand. Two one-thousand. Three one-thousand. At ten, I glanced inside. I saw a little old lady sitting on a couch watchin...

Last night was a good night. I took home $41 and change. I headed toward the dish sink after a delivery. I chatted with a few people on my way back. I grabbed a dish bin, executed a controlled drift around a manager desk and pulled out of my curve in the middle of prep work. Several people were engaged in various tasks. The smell of Food Release was heavy. The Warrior passed me on the way. He was headed back to his current post near the front of the store. The Warrior appears to be a young man. With the amount of vegetable oil and salt, who knows? He’s quiet. He’s skilled. He is always busy. I feel we are growing a quiet, mutual respect. He does his job well. I look up to him. During a previous week, I was doing dishes. It’s a simple process. Flat trays with protrusions at regular intervals for dishes are loaded as full as possible, then shoved in the Dishwasher. With a capital D. This thing is intense. Dishes go in. Doors come down. A sea monster blasts water from the roof of t...

$1,104,218.21 I want you to think about that number. How big is that dollar amount to you? Do some comparisons. How does it compare to your current bank balance? To what your home or car is worth? To how much every home your immediate family owns are worth combined? How does it compare against your annual salary? Smell the bills in your mind. What do they smell like? I hope they don’t smell like body odor and cigarettes. If they do, take them back… to wherever you got them in your mind. Then go to your mind bank. But not just any mind bank. Go to the bank where they spritz the money with Chanel No. 5 or something. Maybe they cook bacon near your money. In my mind-bank, the teller people keep Warm Vanilla Sugar scented spray in one of those squirt bottles with the fan. I admit, some of you may prefer body odor and cigarettes. Stay with me. Let’s get more tangible. If you were to take that many one dollar bills and line them up on their sides, it would make a line of money ten m...

I’m a Mormon, in case anybody missed it from the Intro . Find out more about us here . I don’t intend to represent the Church in what I write or say. I represent myself. I believe in Jesus Christ. I believe the canon of Scripture is open. Every single stanza of it shouts the truth of the sacrifice and resurrection of the Savior. It does so with loving light and power through every written word. The Word doesn’t stop there, either. Modern Noahs, Abrahams, Peters, James and Johns reveal direction to all of us, Mormon or not. They do this at least twice a year. This flood of light, love and help is intense. “But RI,” you may ask, “what does this have to do with delivering pizzas and killing debt?” Everything. What I have learned about family drives me. Fellow Christian Dave Ramsey quotes Scripture on a constant basis. His experience is rooted in how poor money management was destroying his family and marriage. But he changed. He decided he was going to manage money like God wan...