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

by Bob Goff

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.

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

Those who are becoming love don’t throw people off roofs; they lower people through them instead.

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 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.

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

What I’ve learned following Jesus is we only really find our identities by engaging the people we’ve been avoiding.

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

People who are becoming love experience the same uncertainties we all do. They just stop letting fear call the shots.

What’s crazy is when we’re not afraid and engage the world with a childlike faith, the people around us won’t be afraid either.

I think he was looking for a plan, but Jesus told him about his purpose instead.

we can’t love people we don’t know.

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.

Even when someone’s suggestions aren’t intended to be manipulative, they still feel like it.

After long enough, what looks like faith isn’t really faith anymore. It’s just compliance. The problem with mere compliance is it turns us into actors. Rather than making decisions ourselves, we read the lines off the script someone we were told to respect handed to us, and we sacrifice our ability to decide for ourselves.

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.

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. All the directions we’re giving to each other aren’t getting people to the feet of Jesus. More often, the unintended result is they lead these people back to us. Here’s the problem: 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. 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.

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.

We can’t allow this to happen between us. Shame will do this, and fears will too. Dumb arguments will do it. Pride and its unreasonable expectations will do it. Our failures and embarrassment will do it. Each of these will tell us as many lies as we’ll listen to, then steal our words, rob us of the rhythms we’ve established with people we’ve come to know, and tell us to run away.

You’ve probably messed up a couple of times. Me too. Run back toward God, not away from Him.

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.

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.

He said He wanted us to build a kingdom, and there’s a big difference between building a castle and building a kingdom.

You see, castles have moats to keep creepy people out, but kingdoms have bridges to let everyone in.

it’s how we treat the trolls in our lives that will let us know how far along we are in our faith.

If we want a kingdom, then we start the way grace did, by drawing a circle around everyone and saying they’re in.

The fact is, what skews my view of people who are sometimes hard to be around is that God is working on different things in their lives than He is working on in mine.

God knows we’re easily confused and often wayward, and He pursues us with love anyway. I think He wants us to see things the way He does, and it’s not going to happen from the top floor of our castles. It will happen at the ground level of grace.

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?

That’s our job. It’s always been our job. We’re supposed to just love the people in front of us. We’re the ones who tell them who they are.

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.

People don’t grow where they are informed; they grow where they’re loved and accepted. Talk about who people are becoming and who you see them turning into.

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

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. For me, agreeing is cheap and obeying is costly. Obeying is costly because it’s uncomfortable. It makes me grow one decision and one discussion at a time. It makes me put away my pride. These are the kinds of decisions that aren’t made once for a lifetime; they’re made thirty seconds at a time.

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.

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.

Sometimes we make loving people a lot more complicated than Jesus did. We don’t need to anymore. It’s just up, down, and out.

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

We get so good at fooling other people and reading our own news clippings about who we are that we end up believing we’ve arrived at a place we haven’t

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. Hoping is just hoping. Don’t be fooled. It’s easy to do.

The story about Ananias lets us know, however, just how strongly God feels about us keeping it real and transparent and honest about where we actually are, rather than faking it and pretending we’re someone we only hope to be someday.

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.

These days, when I’m speaking to a group of people and find myself talking about the man I wish I was, rather than the person I am right now, I clap my hands to remind myself to sync up what I’m saying with what I’m doing.

Here’s the deal: when we act like someone we’re not, it’s often because we’re not happy with who we are.