Love Does: Discover a Secretly Incredible Life in an Ordinary World

by Bob Goff

place where the stuff of imagination, whimsy, and wonder are easier to live out—not just think about or put off until “next time.”

We are the means, the method, the object, and the delivery vehicles. God can use anyone, for sure. If you can shred on a Fender or won “Best Personality,” you’re not disqualified—it just doesn’t make you more qualified.

God usually chooses ordinary people like us to get things done.

Being engaged is a way of doing life, a way of living and loving. It’s about going to extremes and expressing the bright hope that life offers us, a hope that makes us brave and expels darkness with light.

That’s what I want my life to be all about—full of abandon, whimsy, and in love. I want to be engaged to life and with life.

I’ve found it’s because what God has for us is obscured from view, just around another bend in the road.

While painful at the time, I can see now, many years later when I look

in the rearview mirror of my life, evidence of God’s tremendous love and unfolding adventure for me.

And when each of us looks back at all the turns and folds God has allowed in our lives, I don’t think it looks like a series of folded-over mistakes and do-overs that have shaped our lives. Instead, I think we’ll conclude in the end that maybe we’re all a little like human origami and the more creases we have, the better.

That’s what love does—it pursues blindly, unflinchingly, and

without end. When you go after something you love, you’ll do anything it takes to get it, even if it costs everything.

Maybe God is doing some inexplicable things in your life. Each of us gets to decide every time whether to lean in or step back—to say yes, ignore it, or tell God why He has the wrong person.

“You know what it is about someone that makes them a friend? A friend doesn’t just say things; a friend does.”

I want to live in a new normal where I can reach out to people who are different

from me and just be friends.

Friends do—they don’t just think about it.

but I’ve seen plenty of people turn down an invitation to fully live.

I think every day God sends

us an invitation to live and sometimes we forget to show up or get head-faked into thinking we haven’t really been invited.

Accepting the invitation to show up in life is about moving from the bleachers to the field.

“There’s more room.”

“It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”

We’ve all given up something at one time or another.

At first, it always feels like a huge sacrifice to give up what we’ve got. To Jesus, though, it’s no sacrifice at all. Think

He asks if we’ll give up that thing we’re so proud of, that thing

we believe causes us to matter in the eyes of the world, and give it up to follow Him. He’s asking us, “Will you take what you think defines you, leave it behind, and let Me define who you are instead?”

Religious people say that Jesus stands at the door and knocks. I agree. But there’s more. Jesus invites us to stand at the door of His house and do some knocking too. And when He opens a door, He wants us to bring all of the faith we have to Him, even if it’s just a dime’s worth. And He promises that He will trade up with us—because He Himself is what we have the chance to trade for.

And what we’ll have to give in exchange for knowing Him is everything

we’ve accumulated during our lives and are standing on the p...

We can show them that God is full of love and is the source of hope and every creative idea.

trust Don because he’s a good author. I trust God because He’s the best author. I think God doesn’t spell out everything for us in life, but He does tell us how we can write our lives better; and trusting Him implicitly is always the right place to start.

“In my store, shiny pennies are worth double.”

You become like the people you hang around, and to a great degree, you end up going wherever they’re headed. When there is someone else behind the steering wheel, it needs to be someone you’d trust with your life, because you’ve

given a great deal of control over your life to them.

What I’ve decided is a pretty good idea is to just ask people where they’re going before you get in with them. If

faith. It taught me that when God is big enough and loves me enough to say He forgives me, I should actually believe Him. I mean, I shouldn’t keep feeling bad about all of the times I’ve messed up because that’s ignoring what God said, just like Lynn ignored what I said.

I think God’s hope and plan for us is pretty simple to figure out. For those who resonate with formulas, here it is: add your whole life, your loves, your passions, and your interests together with what God said He wants us to be about, and that’s your answer.

If you want to know the answer to the bigger question— what’s God’s plan for the whole

world?—buckle up: it’s us. We’re God’s plan, and we always have been. We aren’t just supposed to be observers, listeners, or have a bunch of opinions. We’re not here to let everyone know what we agree and don’t agree with, because, frankly, who cares? Tell me about the God you love; tell me about what He has inspired uniquely in you; tell me about what you’r...

it seems that what God does most of the time when He has something to say is this . . . He doesn’t pass us messages, instead He passes us each other.

It’s Jesus plus nothing.

stories. I bet it’s about people traveling in the direction of Jesus, trying to follow Him. People like me who made lots of mistakes and midcourse corrections.

They were in there because of who God is and what He has done to draw a circle around them.

And at the end, perhaps simple words spoken

by a loving and proud God will be, “Friends, it’s been a long trip. Welcome home.”

In a world driven by self-promotion and spin, Jesus modeled something different for us. Jesus was saying that instead of telling people about what we’re doing all the time, there’s a better way. One that doesn’t require any capes that can get snagged on something—something

like ourselves. Maybe Jesus wants us to be secretly incredible instead.

That was His plan for self-promotion. Secretly incredible people keep what they do one of God’s best-kept secrets because the only one who needs to kno...

Secretly incredible people just do things.

The truth is, the task would probably be even nobler if we didn’t talk about it and just did it instead.