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

by Bob Goff

Something happens when you feel ownership. You no longer act like a spectator or consumer, because you’re an owner.

The sad thing is, for many there is no “next time” because passing on the chance to cross over is an overall attitude toward life rather than a single decision. They need a change of attitude, not more opportunities.

I used to want to fix people, but now I just want to be with them.

What I learned from Randy changed my view permanently about what it meant to have a friendship with Jesus. I learned that faith isn’t about knowing all of the right stuff or obeying a list of rules. It’s something more, something more costly because it involves being present and making a sacrifice. Perhaps that’s why Jesus is sometimes called Immanuel—“God with us.” I think that’s what God had in mind, for Jesus to be present, to just be with us. It’s also what He has in mind for us when it comes to other people.

But the kind of love that God created and demonstrated is a costly one because it involves sacrifice and presence.

The people who slowly became typical have the greatest problem wrapping their minds around a dynamic friendship with an invisible, alive God.

Jesus told the people He was with that it’s not enough to just look like you love God. He said we’d know the extent of our love for God by how well we loved people.

I learned that fully loving and fully living are not only synonymous but the kind of life that Jesus invited us to be part of.

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 enjoy those parts of the Bible where Jesus talks about how much He loves His bride. It makes me wonder if the trees and mountains and rivers are things He planned in advance, knowing they would wow us.

I used to be afraid of failing at something that really mattered to me, but now I’m more afraid of succeeding at things that don’t matter.

The thing I love about God is He intentionally guides people into failure.

It has always seemed to me that broken things, just like broken people, get used more;

I want to live in a new normal where I can reach out to people who are different from me and just be friends.

He said the people who followed Him should think of themselves more like the ushers rather than the bouncers, and it would be God who decides who gets in.

Words spoken by kind people have the ability to endure in our lives.

Why does spellcheck make me capitalize satan’s name? I don’t want to. It’s giving him too much credit.

There’s a special relationship between a dad and a daughter, something God designed on purpose, I think. It’s not lost on me that of all of the names God could have asked us to call Him, we most often refer to Him as “Father.” I think that’s because He has the same kind of relationship in mind for us that I had in mind for my kids. I think a father’s job, when it’s done best, is to get down on both knees, lean over his children’s lives, and whisper, “Where do you want to go?”

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’re going to do about it, and a plan for your life will be pretty easy to figure out from there. I guess what I’m saying is that most of us don’t get an audible plan for our lives. It’s way better than that. We get to be God’s plan for the whole world by pointing people toward Him.

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.