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

“What I’ve come to realize, though, is that I was avoiding the people I didn’t understand and the ones who lived differently than me. Here’s why: some of them creeped me out. Sure, I was polite to them, but sadly, I’ve spent my whole life avoiding the people Jesus spent His whole life engaging. 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. […] There are people in my life and yours who are unsafe, toxic, and delight in sowing discord wherever they go.” 

This quote expresses major repeated themes. First, true followers of Jesus are literally becoming love. Second, to become love, one must love the unlovable; Goff stresses the difficulty of doing so repeatedly. This passage also reveals Goff’s tendency to use vague assertions to make sweeping statements. He does not, for example, define what “becoming love” means or what makes someone lovable.

“Her voice broke a little as she said, ‘Bob, I just got back from the doctor, and she gave me some bad news. I have cancer.’ […] I was sad for Carol and could tell she was terrified. I thought for a second, then said, ‘Carol, I’m coming over with something.’ No doubt, she was a little puzzled. I rushed to RadioShack and got us two walkie-talkies. I set up one next to Carol’s bed, and I set up the other one next to ours. Carol and I started talking exclusively on walkie-talkies […]. Something happens when you’re talking on walkie-talkies. You get the same feeling when you connect two peach cans together with a string—you’re both instantly transformed into nine-year-olds. No one has cancer, nobody is alone, and no one is terrified anymore.”

Goff’s impulsivity is clear in this passage. Throughout the book, Goff records numerous acts of impetuous behavior. He delights in these unpredictable actions that surprise, puzzle, and often dismay others. Here, Goff implies that his sudden decision to provide his ill neighbor with a walkie-talkie was an act of love that mediated her fear, although the reader cannot know for sure whether his actions really have their intended effect.

“We’re not supposed to love only our neighbors, but Jesus thought we should start with them. I bet He knew if our love isn’t going to work for the people who live close to us, then it’s probably not going to work for the rest of the world. Jesus didn’t say who our neighbors are either […]. 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.” 

This passage displays one of Goff’s signature devices: speaking for Jesus and God. While he occasionally uses this practice to humorous effect, he asserts the motivations and intentions of Jesus and God regularly without expressing how he is privy to their thoughts. At certain points, Goff confesses an inability to grasp God’s actions and plans. At other times, Goff speaks with confident certainty about God’s divine will and plans for humanity. Another thing Goff seems to be certain of, as this passage reveals, is God’s gender.

“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 for 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 […]. The fix for all this is as easy as the problem is hard. 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. […] All the directions we’re giving to each other aren’t getting people to the feet of Jesus […]. Here’s the problem: when we make ourselves the hall monitors of other people’s behavior, we risk having approval become more important than Jesus’ love.” 

This is one of several passages in which Goff makes subtle jabs toward religious faiths and authority figures. He implies that the deference we often give to religious leaders is because we have been taught to respect them and not because they can offer us transformative spirituality. Logically, therefore, establishing a behavioral code we must teach and oversee interferes not only with the spiritual development of our proteges, but with our own. Again, Goff does not explain, telling people who they are as opposed to how they should act.

“He [God] demonstrated the word with is much bigger and worthier and more accessible than any ten Bible verses […]. It doesn’t sound like a big theological statement, because it’s not. It’s a huge theological statement. It’s God’s purpose for us. It’s the reason Jesus came. It’s the whole Bible in a word. People who are becoming love are with those who are hurting and help them get home. I’ve always thought that people who didn’t want to be with people here are going to hate heaven. Truly, it will be everybody, always there.”

Reflecting on this quote, it is significant to remember that the only title Goff ever attributes to Jesus is “Immanuel,” from Matthew 1:23, which translates as “God with us.” Here Goff is saying that the inscription God would leave with us in our homes is the word “with.” His development of this idea reveals his belief that 1) God’s presence with us is God’s purpose for human existence; 2) those who “are becoming love” embody that divine presence; and 3) Goff believes in universal salvation. He believes there is an eternal afterlife with God and that every human being will be present.

“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. Here’s how it works: When I meet someone who is hard to get along with, I think 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 […]. I try to love that 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 for me. […] I try to see difficult people in front of me for who they could become someday […]. It’s easy to agree with what Jesus said. What’s hard is actually doing what Jesus did.” 

Goff here expresses criticism of a typical Christian hypocrisy: People express belief in the sacredness of Jesus and agree with his principle of unmerited, unqualified love but do not act upon their faith. He confesses experiencing great difficulty in loving irritating individuals. This quote reveals Goff’s perception that the love Jesus demonstrates and demands must be emotional in addition to being active.

“Here’s the deal: when we act like someone we’re not, it’s often because we’re not happy with who we are […]. But it’s bad if we miss out on who God uniquely made us to be so we can be who someone else thinks we should be. 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.”

This quote is the culmination of an extended meditation on the importance of being authentic and not being what Goff calls a “poser.” Ultimately his judgment is that God has made us all individually and uniquely, each with our own growing edges. While God does not condemn us for who we are, God does reveal to us precisely who we are and, in doing so, reveals our shortcomings. Goff returns to the notion of telling people who they are repeatedly and says this is what God does for us as a way of fulfilling God’s ultimate goal is for us: to “become love.”

“People like me who overstate the good we’ve done usually do so because we’re looking for validation. We’re ticket counters. I was making a big deal out of my small acts of kindness. I didn’t have a bad or malicious intent, just a confused one. People who are ticket counters are insecure about how much God loves us, so we mistakenly try to quantify how much we love Him back by offering Him success or accomplishments or status or titles. Here’s the problem: these are just a bunch of tickets that mean nothing to Him. He wants our hearts, not our help.”

Goff reflects upon the experience of cashing in a huge number of Skee-Ball tickets and finding out they were practically worthless. He compares this act to vain human efforts to impress God with service. The implication here is that our strident actions to be the best divine servants we can be actually inhibit our interactions with God by making us focus on our own actions rather than being aware of what God is doing.

“The difference between great improvisational jazz and great classical recitals is simple: in the first, there are no wrong note. If someone makes a mistake, nobody cares or even notices. Everyone just keeps tapping their feet. In recitals, however, everyone expects perfection. We spend a lot more time doing recitals in our faith communities than I think Jesus had in mind. Stages, audiences, and platforms change us. People who are becoming love don’t need any of it. It’s not inherently bad to have all the stages, but we can end up playing to the wrong audience.” 

This quote reflects on Goff’s experience of failing miserably in his first piano recital and years later spontaneously playing the same piece perfectly without practice. He compares this anecdote to Christian faith, implying that trying to live a perfect Christian life is a stilted, unvarying performance that is more for our benefit than for God. In his view, vital faith is more like an unpredictable jazz performance with much improvisation. This quote is also a metaphor for Goff’s life: He does poorly when trying to fit within the expectations of others but excels when allowed to determine his own boundaries.

“We bank on one thing happening and it doesn’t. […] We’re all waiting for more information, more confirmation, more certainty at some point. […] We want clarity and instead we get confusion. […] God doesn’t allow these kinds of things to happen to mess with our heads; He uses these circumstances to shape our hearts. He knows difficulties and hardship and ambiguity are what cause us to grow because we are reminded of our absolute dependence upon Him. God’s plans aren’t ruined just because our plans need to change. What if we found out God’s big plan for our lives is that we wouldn’t spend so much of our time trying to figure out a big plan for our lives? Perhaps He just wants us to love Him and love each other. Our ability to change is often blocked by our plans.” 

Goff proclaims the intentions of God and describes the way God acts and doesn’t act in human life in this passage. Goff walks a fine line between saying either God doesn’t intervene in our lives or God directly causes certain unpleasant challenges to happen in our lives by saying instead that God uses the obstacles and confusion we face to remind us of our dependency upon God. Goff restates his idea that the proper life is lived spontaneously without concern about an overarching plan.

“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. This doctor knows what she’s doing. She practically invented eyes. Jesus knows what He’s doing, too, and He did invent eyes. Because I trust both of them, I’m okay with the promise I’ll see more. We’ll see what we spend the most time looking for.” 

This quote comes from a section where Goff discusses a serious eye problem that cost his sight in one eye, resulting in several eye surgeries. When he asked his doctor the prognosis, she repeatedly said only, “You’ll see more.” In this quote, Goff compares that experience to the typical Christian desire to understand more about God and any divine intention. His remarks about the doctor practically inventing eyes is a typical Goff quip. His remark about Jesus inventing eyes reveals that he makes no distinction between God and Jesus.

“The beautiful message of Jesus is His invitation to everyone that they can trade in who they used to be for who God sees them becoming. He said we can each get a new identity in Him. The people who take Him up on this offer begin to define success and failure the way He did. They move from merely identifying with someone’s pain to standing with them in it, and from having a bunch of opinions to giving away love and grace freely. People who are becoming love make doing these things look effortless.” 

Goff expresses his version of the fulfilled Christian life in this expansive, nebulous quote. He is apparently building upon the biblical statement in II Corinthians 5:17: “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away, behold, the new has come” (Revised Standard Version). He expresses the belief that those who accept Jesus begin to perceive the world as Jesus did. Goff asserts this means gaining an empathetic acceptance of the pain of others and surrendering one’s personal opinions. Some Christians might disagree by saying that one does not have to be codependent or unopinionated to treat others with love.

“We need to be careful where our minds dwell. Many of us dwell on what other people are thinking of us. It’s easy to do. But we can be so busy trying to get the approval of others that we forget who Jesus said 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. You’ll know this is happening to you when you go with what’s popular rather than what’s eternal, when you settle for what feels good right now rather than opting for what will make a good and lasting impact a decade from now.” 

Apart from the irony of a compulsively spontaneous person counseling his readers to focus on the long-term consequences of their actions, this quote is noteworthy because Goff reiterates one of his recurring ideals. He writes that Christians should be unconcerned about the opinions of others and instead concerned about “who Jesus said we are,” without defining what he means. He also says that our thoughts serve as a spiritual indicator of whether we are focused on God or worldly things.

“God isn’t always leading us to the safest route forward but to the one where we’ll grow the most. I knew Adam well enough to know he could land the plane. I’d seen him do it a hundred times in more open waters. I had already told him everything I knew about it. He didn’t need any more instructions; he just needed to see I believed in him enough to let him do it. He didn’t need more words or to know what they meant in Greek or Hebrew. He just needed an opportunity. 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.”

This quote is part of Goff’s reflection on his son Adam landing a seaplane on a small lake at the bottom of an alpine canyon. Goff asserts that the key element of succeeding in any significant endeavor is knowing that the right authority believes in you. His quip about not needing to understand meanings in Greek or Hebrew is a caustic criticism of Christian scholars who he believes overcomplicate Christian faith. His greatest learning in both worldly and spiritual matters, he says, came from being trusted and being allowed to act.

“I’ve met a lot of people who say they’re waiting for God to give them a ‘plan’ for their lives. They talk about this ‘plan’ like it’s a treasure map God has folded up in His back pocket. Only pirates have those. People who want a reason to delay often wait for plans. People who are becoming love don’t. It’s almost as if Jesus knew we’d invent excuses under the guise of waiting for His ‘plans,’ so He made it simple for us. He said His plan for all of us was to love Him and then find people who are hungry or thirsty or who feel like strangers or are sick or don’t have clothes or are in prison or creep us out or are our enemies and go love them just like they were Him.”

This statement is Goff’s strongest criticism of passive Christians. He pegs their inactivity to their true intention to avoid active Christian service. This is also the closest he comes to identifying those he describes as “becoming love”: those whom he perceives to be actively involved in loving the needy of the world. Throughout Chapter 15 he has focused on Jesus’s parable “The Judgment of the Nations,” found in Matthew 25:31-46. In this quote, he adds two groups of individuals, those who “creep us out” and “our enemies,” to the groups listed by Jesus in the parable. This is significant because the groups as listed by Jesus were the most marginalized people of the day. Jesus likely named them for this specific reason as opposed to their being unlovable or personal enemies.

“Even when we do it right, often we don’t land it right. Here’s what I mean: Jesus knew some of us would be tempted to tell everyone who would listen about all the things we’d done. He talked about religious people standing on street corners, but He was really talking about guys like me. Maybe he was talking about you too. He said if we made a big deal about what we’d done now, hoping to get someone to clap, we would have had our reward. We don’t need to be the hero in everyone’s story. Jesus already landed that part. When you do something for Jesus […] don’t mess it up by making a big deal out of it.”

This passage is ironic because it follows Goff’s telling of an elaborate story about his going far out of his way to help a prison inmate when others would not. However, it is genuine because Goff repeatedly details his personal struggle with grandiosity. Here he identifies himself as someone who needs to keep quiet about his religious outreach work. The scripture passage he refers to is Matthew 6:1-4, in which Jesus admonishes his followers to practice their benevolence secretly.

“People will figure out what we really believe by seeing what we actually do. Everybody has a plan, but God is looking for people who know their purpose. As often as I try to make it look otherwise, most of the time I make everything about me. I make it about my schedule and my timing, how I’m feeling and how big of a hurry I’m in. Kind of like Paul in the Bible, I talk a good game, but I find myself doing exactly what I said I wouldn’t do and not doing what I said I would. It’s taken some time, but I’m starting to act like my purpose is to love God and to love the people around me the way Jesus loved the people around Him.”

As the book progresses, Goff makes more statements like this that are truly self-effacing and not merely posturing. Ironically, even though he is sincerely revealing his shortcomings, he still compares himself to a great Christian servant, the Apostle Paul. The passage he refers to is Romans 7:19, “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do” (Revised Standard Version). Goff restates what he perceives to be his ultimate purpose in life, to love others as Jesus loved.

“I spoke to a guy once who said the church had hurt his feeling, so he was leaving it. I told him, ‘You can’t leave the church, you are the church.’ That guy is part of our church. Your church is part of our church too. Even if you don’t think you go to a church, you’re part of our church. At our church there is nothing to join, just Jesus. This is probably why Jesus told His friends, where two or more people who follow Him go, He’s there. I get asked all the time, ‘Where do you go to church?’ As you might imagine, my answer is always the same: I go to our church. I’m not trying to dodge the question when I say this; I’m trying to be accurate.”

Goff reveals the full extent of his theological perception in this quote: He believes all humanity is part of “our church.” When he says there is “nothing to join” in our church, he expresses the idea that all human beings are already included in one body. As the book progresses, he will build upon this idea by stating in Chapter 20 that the crucifixion effectively binds all humanity to God through the sacrifice of Jesus. The scripture he refers to, Matthew 18:20, “For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them” (Revised Standard Version), is both a promise of divine presence and a warning to followers of Jesus not to fall short of Jesus’s command to be compassionate and inclusive.

“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.”

This quote comes during a chapter devoted to examples of people with tangible reasons for dread who overcame their fears and in doing so made huge positive impacts. Among the examples, Goff discusses his own experience, recounting the occasion he talked himself past armed guards into an unscheduled meeting with the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Uganda. This surprising, capricious risk on Goff’s part opened the door for tremendous change and influence in Uganda after its recently concluded civil war.

“Jesus didn’t come to make us look like we’ve got it together. He came to let us know how to be like Him. I’m all for that, but does loving my enemies include guys like Kabi? I don’t think so. But here is where I’m stopped dead in my tracks. On the day Jesus died on the cross, He was broken for us—not unlike the judge’s pen. It was like God was saying, ‘What’s been done today will never be undone.’”

Kabi, the “enemy” Goff refers to, was a Ugandan witch doctor who had just been convicted of the mutilation and attempted murder of an eight-year-old boy. His heinous actions had stirred abject hatred within Goff. Kabi was the first witch doctor prosecuted by the Ugandan court system, a watershed event given the fearful grip witch doctors had over the majority of the populace. At the end of the trial, the judge followed the custom of breaking the pencil with which the verdict was written.

“Why does God do things like this? The honest answer is, I’m not really sure, but I’ve got a good guess. I think He wants to blow our minds. There’s a letter in the Bible Paul sent to some of his friends. He was trying to explain something similar. He acknowledged not many of the people he was writing to were wise or powerful or born into famous families. But he said God used unbelievable things, just like what happened to Charlie, so we wouldn’t keep making everything about ourselves but instead would see how powerful God is.”

Goff writes this after describing a series of amazing events. He relates that a California surgeon heard the story of Charlie, the boy who survived the witch doctor’s attempt to kill him, and contacted Goff to say he could reconstruct the boy’s disfigurement and would do it without cost. Goff went to Uganda and brought Charlie with him through England to the United States. Upon arriving in Washington, DC, Goff learned that President Barack Obama wanted to meet Charlie. The Pauline passage he alludes to is I Corinthians 1:24-30, in which Paul states God intentionally glorifies the lowly to display the power of God.

“Kabi spoke for thirty minutes. Honestly, I’ve never heard anyone hack the gospel message worse than Kabi did that day. His message was garbled and halting, and he barely got anything right. By the time he was done, I wondered if I even believed in Jesus anymore. But here’s the thing: every guy in that place knew who Kabi was and what he had done, and more than a few knew I was the guy who put him there. Our standing in the courtyard together, not as enemies but as brothers, filled in all the words Kabi had messed up about Jesus. This is the story Jesus came to tell in your life, my life, Kabi’s life. He said He would turn us into love if we were willing to leave behind who we used to be.”

Convinced it is in the best interest of his own spirituality to face the witch doctor he put away for attempted murder, Goff goes to Uganda and meets with Kabi. Kabi surprises Goff by asking for forgiveness and by accepting the love of Jesus. Then Kabi gets permission to witness to all the men in the prison, after which he begins to baptize some of them. Like Kabi’s sermon, biblical scholars and theologians might read Goff’s theology and his treatment of scriptures and make a statement of similar amazement at Goff’s influence in the name of Jesus.

“Here’s what I learned: when you’ve got a guide you can trust, you don’t have to worry about the path you’re on. It’s the same lesson I’ve been learning about Jesus. I’m just trying to follow love’s lead. […] Following Jesus means climbing, tripping, dusting ourselves off, and climbing some more. Faith isn’t a business trip walked on a sidewalk; it’s an adventure worked out on a steep and sometimes difficult trail.”

Goff writes this after having taken Charlie on a climb up Mount Kilimanjaro, the highest peak in Africa. The struggle for Goff was following the directions of the guide who had to constantly tell him to slow down. He correlates this experience to his impatience in growing as a Christian, acknowledging his belief that he has tried to go faster than Jesus was leading him throughout his life.