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

by Bob Goff

They decided to spend more time loving people than trying to game the system by just agreeing with Jesus. You see, they wanted to follow Jesus’ example; instead of telling people what Jesus meant, they just loved people the way He did.

they love them Jesus-style—with extravagant grace.

God doesn’t want us to just study Him like He’s an academic project. He wants us to become love.

I hope my life says that I loved like Jesus, not that I only knew about Jesus.

It’s given me a lot of comfort knowing we’re all rough drafts of the people we’re still becoming.

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.

He wants us to love everybody, always—and start with the people who creep us out.

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.

Burning down others’ opinions doesn’t make us right. It makes us arsonists.

God’s endgame has always been the same. He wants our hearts to be His. He wants us to love the people near us and love the people we’ve kept far away.

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 His plan all along has been for us to meet the people He made and feel like we just met Him.

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.

I think while we might be known for our opinions, we’ll be remembered for our love.

When some of Jesus’ friends were arguing about who would get to sit closer to Him when they got to heaven, Jesus told them unless they changed and became like children, they’d never enter the kingdom of God. I think what He was saying is we need a childlike faith to understand Him. That makes a lot of sense to me.

We also don’t need to make faith easier, because it’s not; we need to make it simpler, because it is.

This lawyer asked Jesus what the greatest commandment was. I think he was looking for a plan, but Jesus told him about his purpose instead.

Sometimes we see these as two separate ideas, but Jesus saw loving God and loving our neighbors as one inseparable mandate.

we can stop waiting for a plan and just go love everybody.

No one expects us to love them flawlessly, but we can love them fearlessly, furiously, and unreasonably.

Jesus didn’t say who our neighbors are either. Probably so we wouldn’t start making lists of those we don’t need to love.

He made a whole world of neighbors. We call it earth, but God just calls it a really big neighborhood.

When joy is a habit, love is a reflex. Because we’ve been putting on the parade for decades, we know all the people who live near us. I don’t know if they’ve learned anything from us, but we’ve learned a ton about loving each other from them. God didn’t give us neighbors to be our projects; He surrounded us with them to be our teachers.

The problem with mere compliance is it turns us into actors.

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.

when we make ourselves the hall monitor of other people’s behavior, we risk having approval become more important than Jesus’ love.

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.

What made sense to me when I first heard about Jesus is how He doesn’t give us a bunch of directions intended to manipulate our behavior or control our conduct. Instead, He has beautiful hopes for us and has told us what those are, but He isn’t scowling at us when we’re not yet ready to have those same hopes for ourselves. He won’t love us more or less based on how we act, and He’s more interested in our hearts than all the things we do. He’s not stuck telling us what to do, when to do it, or what we want either. Far better, He continues to tell us through our successes and our mistakes who we are, and here’s what He wants us to know—we are His.

Jesus told His friends we weren’t supposed to spend our lives building castles. He said He wanted us to build a kingdom, and there’s a big difference between building a castle and building a kingdom.

castles have moats to keep creepy people out, but kingdoms have bridges to let everyone in. Castles have dungeons for people who have messed up, but kingdoms have grace.

If we want a kingdom, then we start the way grace did, by drawing a circle around everyone and saying they’re in. Kingdoms are built from the people up. There’s no set of plans—just Jesus.

This quote is really hitting me hard. #EverybodyAlways

You’ll be able to spot people who are becoming love because they want to build kingdoms, not castles. 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.

Here’s the question I keep asking myself: What do I want my window to say? This question is worth thinking about even if you don’t know the answer. What part are you going to play in building the kind of kingdom Jesus said would outlast us all?

Jesus told His friends that letting people see the way we love each other would be the best way to let people know about Him. It wouldn’t be because we’d given them a lot of directions or instructions or because they memorized or studied all the right things. It would be because someone met you or me and felt as if they’d just met Jesus.

When the limo driver went home that night to the woman he’s been living with for the past ten years, do you think he told her he’d met a Christian guy that day who told him he was supposed to be married? Of course not! I bet he told her he’d met a guy who told him who he was.

Loving people doesn’t mean we need to control their conduct. There’s a big difference between the two. Loving people means caring without an agenda. As soon as we have an agenda, it’s not love anymore.

It’s this simple: I want people to meet you and me and feel like they’ve just met everyone in heaven.

When God sent Jesus into the world, He demonstrated He didn’t just want to be an observer in the lives of the ones He loved. He wanted to be a participant. He wanted to be with the ones He loved.

What I’ve been doing with my faith is this: instead of saying I’m going to believe in Jesus for my whole life, I’ve been trying to actually obey Jesus for thirty seconds at a time.

It’s easy to agree with what Jesus said. What’s hard is actually doing what Jesus did.

If we want to be like Jesus, here’s our simple and courageous job: Catch people on the bounce. When they mess up, reach out to them with love and acceptance the way Jesus did. When they hit hard, run to them with your arms wide open to hug them even harder. God wants to be with them when they mess up, and He wants us to participate.

People who are becoming love stop faking it about who they are and where they are in their lives and their faith.

The same thing happens in our faith. We hope for good things to happen to people in need. We hope it and we hope it and we hope it some more. When we do, our brain can fool us into thinking we’re actually helping. But hoping isn’t helping.

I think God can use us wherever we are. The Bible is full of stories of people who messed up. It seems like failure in the world was a requirement for success with God. People who are becoming love keep it real about who they are right now, while living in constant anticipation about who God’s helping them become.

God has never looked in your mirror or mine and wished He saw someone else.

Every time we fake it and aren’t authentic, we make God’s love for us look fake too.

He doesn’t want us to just look different. He wants us to become love.

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.

We weren’t just an idea God hoped would work out someday. We were one of His most creative expressions of love, ever.

Instead of saying you’re a missionary, why not just go somewhere to learn about your faith from the people you find there and be as helpful as you can be?