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

by Bob Goff

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

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.

What Jesus told His friends can be summed up in this way: He wants us to love everybody, always—and start with the people who creep us out. The truth is, we probably creep them out as much as they do us.

God gave us discernment, and we should use it as we live our lives.

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.

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. To do this, He wants us to live without fear. We don’t need to use our opinions to mask our insecurities anymore. Instead, God wants us to grow love in our hearts and then cultivate it by the acre in the world.

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.

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.

“Love one another.” What is simple often isn’t easy; what is easy often doesn’t last.

It’s one thing we all have in common: we’re all somebody’s neighbor, and they’re ours. This has been God’s simple yet brilliant master plan from the beginning. 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.

God didn’t give us neighbors to be our projects; He surrounded us with them to be our teachers.

Our friends do things like this for us. They help us see the life Jesus talked about while giving it to us in smaller pieces—sometimes just a teaspoonful at a time.

Selfless love has the power to transform even the darkest places into meadows.

Don’t tell people what they want; tell them who they are.

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.

Run back toward God, not away from Him.

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.

God isn’t wowed by fancy words; He delights in humble hearts.

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

People don’t grow where they are informed; they grow where they’re loved and accepted.

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.

If we want to be like Jesus, here’s our simple and courageous job: Catch people on the bounce.

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.

We can either keep track of all the good we’ve done or all the good God’s done. Only one will really matter to us. In the end, none of us wants to find out we traded the big life Jesus talked about for a box full of worthless acknowledgment.

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.

Our ability to change is often blocked by our plans.

We want God to tell us all the details, but all we usually get is a promise that we’ll see more of Him if we look in the right places.

God doesn’t just give us Himself. Sometimes He gives us a few other people in our lives whose voices we can trust.

To figure out where we are we need to understand who we are.

Here’s the problem: when we’re busy getting our validation from the people around us, we stop looking for it from God.

God isn’t always leading us to the safest route forward but to the one where we’ll grow the most.

We’re God’s calligraphy.

People don’t grow where they’re planted; they grow where they’re loved.

Great love often involves tremendous risk.

It’s easy to confuse busyness with progress and accomplishments with pleasing Jesus. Every day we get to decide whether we’re really following Jesus or treating Him like He’s just a Sherpa carrying our stuff.