Everybody, Always: Becoming Love in a World Full of Setbacks and Difficult People

by Bob Goff

I’ve spent my whole life trying to make my faith easy. The truth is, it’s not. From what I’ve been reading, if we do it right, it will actually kill all the earlier versions of us. What I’m trying to do now is make my faith simple.

It’s given me a lot of comfort knowing we’re all rough drafts of the people we’re still becoming. I hope this second version of the book

Jesus talked to His friends a lot about how we should identify ourselves. He said it wouldn’t be what we said we believed or all the good we hoped to do someday. Nope, He said we would identify ourselves simply by how we loved people. It’s tempting to think there is more to it, but there’s not. Love isn’t something we fall into; love is someone we become.

God’s idea isn’t that we would just give and receive love but that we could actually become love. People who are becoming love see the beauty in others even when their off-putting behavior makes for a pretty weird mask.

There’s a difference between good judgment and living in judgment. The trick is to use lots of the first and to go a little lighter on the second. What I’m learning about love is that we have to tackle a good amount of fear to love people who are difficult.

What I’ve come to realize is if I really want to “meet Jesus,” then I have to get a lot closer to the people He created. All of them, not just some of them.

I think Jesus meant something different when He said “enemies.” He meant we should love the people we don’t understand. The ones we disagree with. The ones who are flat wrong about more than a couple of things. I have plenty of those people in my life, and my bet is you do too. In fact, I might be one of those people sometimes.

I’m trying to resist the bait that darkness offers me every day to trade kindness for rightness.

These are not mutually exclusive ideas, of course, but there’s a big difference between being kind and being right. Pick the most controversial social issue of the day, and you’ll find passionate voices on all sides. The sad fact is, many of us have lost our way trying to help people find theirs. Arguments won’t change people. Simply giving away kindness won’t either. Only Jesus has the power to change people, and it will be harder for them to see Jesus if their view of Him is blocked by our big opinions.

What I’ve learned following Jesus is we only really find our identities by engaging the people we’ve been avoiding. Jesus wrapped up this concept in three simple and seemingly impossible ideas for us to follow: love Him, love your neighbor, and love your enemies.

Loving each other is what we were meant to do and how we were made to roll. It’s not where we start when we begin following Jesus; it’s the beautiful path we travel the rest of our lives. Will it be messy and ambiguous and uncomfortable when we love people the way Jesus said to love them? You bet it will. Will we be misunderstood? Constantly. But extravagant love often means coloring outside the lines and going beyond the norms. Loving the neighbors we don’t understand takes work and humility and patience and guts. It means leaving the security of our easy relationships to engage in some tremendously awkward ones.

Find someone you think is wrong, someone you disagree with, someone who isn’t like you at all, and decide to love that person the way you want Jesus to love you. We need to love everybody, always. Jesus never said doing these things would be easy. He just said it would work.

When joy is a habit, love is a reflex.

Even though I knew my dad was right, I could have had five cans of Pennzoil, a funnel, and a filter in the front seat and I still wouldn’t have done it. Why? It’s simple. Most people don’t want to be told what they want. It’s in our DNA to assess our environment, take in the inputs, and decide for ourselves what we’ll do. We resist in several ways. Sometimes we send people the message with a sharp word or gesture to create some distance. Other times we resist by being passively detached and polite, while projecting a load of indifference. The reason we do this is as simple as it is complicated. Even when someone’s suggestions aren’t intended to be manipulative, they still feel like it.

Instead of telling people what they want, we need to tell them who they are. This works every time. We’ll become in our lives whoever the people we love the most say we are. God did this constantly in the Bible. He told Moses he was a leader and Moses became one. He told Noah he was a sailor and he became one. He told Sarah she was a mother and she became one. He told Peter he was a rock and he led the church. He told Jonah he’d be fish food and, well, he was. If we want to love people the way God loved people, let God’s Spirit do the talking when it comes to telling people what they want.

Telling people what they should want turns us into a bunch of sheriffs. People who are becoming love lose the badge and give away grace instead. Tell the people you meet who they’re becoming, and trust that God will help people to find their way toward beautiful things in their lives without you.

Shame does that to us. It makes us leave safe places. It breaks the rhythms we’ve established with each other. This guy and I had never needed words. After he made a mistake that day, he no doubt thought there would be many words he’d need to give me, but shame makes us silent. It strips us of the few words we might have. It mutes our life and our love. It’s the pickpocket of our confidence.

Most of us will do almost anything, even foolish things, to avoid being told what it is we want. When someone tries to control us, it teaches us new ways to be dumb because it reminds us of old ways we’ve been manipulated before.

The son ran back toward the relationship he had with his father, not away from it. It’s something we all get to decide whether we’ll do. You’ve probably messed up a couple of times. Me too. Run back toward God, not away from Him.

The father wasn’t thinking about how badly the son had messed up. The son wasn’t thinking about it either. They both knew the son had steered his life right off a cliff, but somehow they got past the shame of the failure and got to the celebration of being together once again. Do lots of that. Find your way back to the people you’ve loved and who have loved you. Figure out who you’ve broken your rhythm with. Don’t let the misunderstanding decide your future. If you lost your way with God, let Him close the distance between you and start the celebration again. We’re all in the same truck when it comes to our need for love and acceptance and forgiveness.

They fill their lives with people who don’t look like them or act like them or even believe the same things as them. They treat them with love and respect and are more eager to learn from them than presume they have something to teach.

two. Loving people means caring without an agenda. As soon as we have an agenda, it’s not love anymore. It’s acting like you care to get someone to do what you want or what you think God wants them to do. Do less of that, and people will see a lot less of you and more of Jesus.

Can I love that person for the next thirty seconds? While they continue to irritate me, I find myself counting silently, . . . twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine . . . and before I get to thirty, I say to myself, Okay, I’m going to love that person for thirty more seconds. This is what I’ve been doing with the difficult commands of Jesus too. Instead of agreeing with all of them, I’m trying to obey God for thirty seconds at a time and live into them. I try to love the person in front of me the way Jesus did for the next thirty seconds rather than merely agree with Jesus and avoid them entirely, which I’m sad to say comes easier to me. I try to see difficult people in front of me for who they could become someday, and I keep reminding myself about this possibility for thirty seconds at a time. It’s

I keep putting on my parachute and getting in the plane with Adam on the weekends. Truth be known, I don’t like skydiving as much as he does, but I like Adam a lot. Find what the people you love want to do and then go be with them in it. If Adam wanted to make pizzas, I’d grow the tomatoes. Be with each other. Don’t just gather information about people who have failed big or are in need—go be with them. When you get there, don’t just be in proximity—be present. Catch them. Don’t try to teach them. There’s a big difference.

We should all have beautiful ambitions for our lives and who we might become, but we also need to sync it up so we’re not fooled into believing we’ve already arrived at a place in our faith we’ve only been thinking about going to someday.

Do you want to do something amazing for God? Trade the appearance of being close to God for the power of actually being close to God. Quit talking a big game and go live a big faith. One of Jesus’ friends said if we want to get it right, we need to live a life worthy of the calling we’ve received. The call is to love God and the people around us while we live into the most authentic version of ourselves. We weren’t just an idea God hoped would work out someday. We were one of His most creative expressions of love, ever. Lose

The promise of love and grace in our lives is this: Our worst day isn’t bad enough, and our best day isn’t good enough. We’re invited because we’re loved, not because we earned it.

memorizing what we do repeatedly. It’s the way we were wired from the factory. Because this is how we’re made, it’s a great idea to pick actions worth repeating. People who are turning into love do this. They adopt beautiful patterns and surrounding imagery for their lives. They fill their lives with songs, practices, and habits that communicate love, acceptance, grace, generosity, whimsy, and forgiveness. People who are becoming love repeat these actions so often they don’t even realize they’re doing it anymore. It’s just finger memory to them.

What delights you? What fires your imagination? What fills you with a deep sense of meaning and purpose? What draws you closer to God? What is going to last in your life and in the lives of others? Do those things.

People like Karl have found something many of us are still looking for. He knows he’s neither defined nor limited by his circumstances. He sees power in his brokenness and opportunities in the opposition he faces. Karl’s not stuck trying to figure out why this thing happened to him; he’s too busy celebrating other people’s lives and making things happen for them. People like Karl don’t think about what they’ve lost. They think about what they’ll do with what they still have. And the answer is much.

The people who have shaped my faith the most did the same for me. They didn’t try to teach me anything; they let me know they trusted me. And that taught me everything. Those moments are forever etched into who I am. I think God does the same with us.

Sadly, sometimes I only pretend to care for people who are hurting. The way I know this is simple—I don’t do anything to help them. I’ll say I am too busy to help someone in need when it isn’t time I lack; it’s compassion. In short, I settle for merely hoping rather than actually helping.

Someone once asked me what I would write if I only had six words for my autobiography. Here’s what I came up with: What if we weren’t afraid anymore? Throughout history, God has spoken three words more often than any others when the people He loved were scared and confused, lost or lonely, paralyzed or stuck. In those times, He usually didn’t make a big speech. He just said to His people, Be. Not. Afraid.

What is it you don’t think you can do? What do you think is too big for you, or too scary, or too risky? Sometimes God whispers it and sometimes He shouts it. Whatever the volume, I bet He’s always using the same three words with us: Be. Not. Afraid.

You can no longer continue to be the person you’ve been? What are you going to let go of? Who is it you don’t get? Who don’t you understand? Who have you been playing it safe with, while politely keeping your distance? Who has been mean or rude or flat wrong or creeps you out? Don’t tell them all your opinions; give them all your love. I know it’s hard for you. It’s hard for me too. But I’m learning I have to follow Jesus’ example and follow His lead if I’m going to follow in His steps. Even when we feel like we can’t muster the strength and humility to love our enemies, the truth is we can. If you do this, I can promise two things will happen. First, it will be messy. Sometimes ugly messy. You’ll also be misunderstood— you might not even understand yourself anymore. The second thing is just as true: you’ll grow. And people who are growing fall forward and bump into Jesus all over again.