We all want to become the best versions of ourselves, but what does that mean and how do you measure your success? Do your accomplishments and accolades equate to the best version of yourself, or do you seek a deeper connection with the world and people around you? According to Everybody, Always, the best version of who you can be is the one who is most in line with God’s plan for you. And God’s plan for everyone is to become love and live as Jesus lived. To become love, you must rid your life of fear, doubt, and judgment and put your faith in God’s love. When you become love, you become the person God created you to be.
The following advice provides a roadmap for you to find the courage to love everyone, even those who are difficult to love. Only through this unconditional form of love will you find yourself.
If you love Jesus, then you must love all of Jesus. God created people in Jesus’s image, which means Jesus lives inside all of us. If you only love the people who are easy to love, you are only loving part of Jesus. Jesus wants you to give love freely so that others can see the power of His love through you. That is your purpose as part of God’s world, and when you fulfill that purpose, you move farther down the path to your true identity.
You may find it hard to show love to everyone freely. You likely experience fear or anxiety when you meet people who scare you, make you uncomfortable, or simply annoy you. This fear is normal, but realize that when you love as Jesus does, you are on the right path with God. You have nothing to fear because God wants you to succeed. Define your life by your faith and ability to love, and you will always receive God’s love in return.
Children are curious by nature and open to adventure. They seek to discover new things about the world and themselves. God wants you to approach your faith in this same way because when you explore your faith like a child, you stop being afraid of what you’ll find. When you fear life or others, you hinder your ability to feel God’s love. You want assurances that your love will be accepted or that God is truly with you, but you can’t experience God’s love from behind barriers.
You have to wander down the path laid out before you with faith that God will guide you to your purpose. Learning to love everyone is a life-long commitment, not a momentary action when you feel strong in your faith. Get out of your comfort zone and be willing to explore the unknown parts of yourself to grow stronger in your faith. You will find it easier to feel love and share love with the world.
Jesus said you should love your neighbors first. He did this because when you learn to love people outside your personal world first, you will be able to love everyone more easily. Your neighbors are not literally the people living in your neighborhood. Your neighbors are everyone you see around you. They are the bus driver, the difficult co-worker, the man sleeping on the street, the person with a different lifestyle, and the person with different beliefs than yours. Everyone is your neighbor, and you are theirs. When you love yourself, you delight God. Love your neighbor like you love yourself to experience more of God’s joy.
You don’t like to be told what to do, and neither does anyone else. But when you disagree with someone or believe you know what is best, you often try to force your opinions on others or control what they do. Think about how you react when someone tries to control your decisions. Even if you comply and do what others tell you, your actions are inauthentic because they didn’t come from a place of love in your heart. And if you aren’t able to live up to others’ expectations, you feel ashamed.
Rather than telling people what they should do, show people who they are. People often rise to the occasion of who others believe them to be. When you show someone who they are, you give them agency to become that person any way they see fit. Their actions become authentic, and you have given them faith in themselves, which equates to faith in God. Becoming love means granting that gift to everyone you see. Don’t set people up to fail by trying to control what they do. Shame leads to silence and distances people from one another. Give people the freedom to become who God has made them to be, and give them love to help support their journey.
God built his kingdom for all of us to live in and wants us to build kingdoms for each other. But most of us build castles surrounded by moats and barricades to keep us safe from the outside world. Your castle is built with the aspects of your life, such as your job, relationships, and possessions. You might build a beautiful castle, but you can’t show everyone love from atop a turret. Instead, build a kingdom that’s open to everyone as God has done for you.
Within your kingdom, commit to loving everyone equally with respect and deference. This is how God loves the people in His kingdom. When you become love, you share your love without restrictions or agenda. And when there is no agenda to your love, you will feel the power of that love and all it can bring to your kingdom. Be with people, not just near people, in your love. If you can be with people, you will be with God.
It’s easy to agree to love people better or follow Jesus’s commandments, but it’s harder to actually do those things. In both instances, you can stay on track in your quest to become love by loving people for 30 seconds. When you meet difficult people, show them love for 30 seconds. When you’ve reached the end, commit to 30 more seconds. Thirty seconds may not seem like a lot, but it’s a reasonable amount of time to ask yourself to do anything, and the more you do it, the more you will become comfortable with the action.
The same is true for following your faith and living like Jesus. You may agree with everything Jesus says, but committing to following Jesus’s example requires change and growth. When you feel all the change and growth happening at once, you can become overwhelmed and give up. Take your personal change and growth 30 seconds at a time to help stay the course. If you give yourself this small amount of space to focus your attention on God, you will ensure your faith is authentic and your growth is real.
People often believe that agreeing with Jesus is enough. You’ve likely believed this, too. You see the way Jesus loves and believes in doing good for others. You may even have done a few things for others here and there. But a temporary action or superficial belief is not the same as becoming love. Flipping parts of you over to hide the flaws is not true change or growth. When you move forward as though it is, you fool yourself and others, but you don’t fool God.
You don’t need to understand your faith perfectly to become love. God knows who you are and what you’re capable of and wants you to get there. He delights in your attempts to become love, not in your assertions that you’ve become love. Be honest with yourself and with God about who you are, who you want to become, and where you are with Him, and He will continue to provide the grace you need to get there.
When you start keeping track of your good deeds as proof of your commitment to God, the actions become more important than your faith. You’re not becoming love but making love about you, not God. God doesn’t care how many people you choose to show love to. He wants your heart, and He wants your honest intention to represent His love to others through your actions.
Consider the example of winning tickets for games played at pizza parlors, such as Showbiz Pizza. You collect these tickets, assuming that the more you have, the greater your reward will be. You start to play only certain games to get the most tickets, rather than the games you actually love to play. But when you finally turn in all those tickets, your reward is a mere trinket, not the expensive gift you were expecting. You inflated the value of your tickets and did what you thought would bring you something equally valuable. If you inflate the value of your actions in the same way, you will never be satisfied in your relationship with God because God’s grace comes in many forms, and you may devalue the grace you’re receiving.
Love for the sake of love, and eventually you will become love. And when you become love, you have pleased God more than any list of accomplishments could.
You likely are similar to most people in that you like to play it safe in life most of the time. You make plans and set expectations for what will happen and seek the answers to your questions before you feel comfortable moving forward. But struggle is what creates change. A life without struggle is a life going nowhere.
God doesn’t provide challenges so He can watch you suffer. He knows you will learn the most lessons when you’re required to be brave. His plan for you has nothing to do with your plans for yourself, and when you wait until everything is figured out before you leap, you miss out on his guidance. You’re not taking a leap of faith when you play it safe. The only thing you need to move forward is faith. Believe in God’s love and His plan for you, and know that as long as you continue to follow the path before you, you will be led to where you’re supposed to be.
Bob Goff learned about his faith while piloting a plane one night. When he activated his landing gear, one of the green lights that signals the proper release of each wheel didn’t light up. It was dark, and there was no way to tell whether the wheel was actually down or not. Bob knew he couldn’t just keep circling the landing strip. He decided to put his faith in God and take the leap. When he touched down, all three wheels of his small plane hit the tarmac. The green light had simply burned out. Don’t let a malfunctioning light keep you from believing in the path before you. Understand that your struggles are what make you stronger.
Becoming love means understanding that the challenges you face along the way are intentional, and if you’re brave enough to keep walking, there will be more love on the other side. You may not always be able to see the next steps ahead, but you don’t have to. Jesus points you in a direction and calls to you from the edge of your life. You don’t need to rush or worry about stumbling. If you fall, Jesus will catch you. And in doing so, He teaches you how to call to others and catch them. When you learn to have blind faith, you will be able to show it to others and point them in the right direction. All you need to do after that is provide encouragement and love, like God has given you.
You’re never going to have everything you think you need to become love, but you don’t need to. What you have in your life is what you are meant to have, and God is waiting for you to offer it up so He can show you how to use it. When you focus on what you don’t have, you create limitations for your life and ability to love. You stray from the path because your head has turned away from God’s love and your life followed.
You will experience hardships in life, and you may lose parts of it you feel you need to go on. Love anyway. When you use what you have to become love in your own unique way, your focus is on love, which means it’s on God. When you focus on your faith, you will know that you have everything you need to become the person you’re supposed to be. God wants you to succeed, and He has confidence in your ability to succeed on your own. Don’t fear your limitations. Find strength in what you have and the courage to allow your gifts to be enough to become love.
If you ran into Jesus on the street, you would stop everything you were doing and do whatever you could to show Him love. What you may not realize is that you meet Jesus every day. Jesus is inside of everyone, which means you have the opportunity to show Jesus love each time someone is in front of you. Some people will be easier to love than others, but the ones who are harder to love were brought to you on purpose. Those people are who you will prove your faith in God with by loving them unconditionally, the way Jesus loves you.
Loving everybody always is a difficult task. You may lose face, pride, money, and time. You may lose friends and receive backlash from others. You might decide those losses are too high a price to pay to love someone you find difficult. But what price would you pay if you knew you were giving love directly to Jesus? Grace, or the embodiment of open love, is not costly when you love like Jesus. The more grace you give to others, the more grace you will receive. God wants people to see Himself in you, and He wants you to see Him in everyone else. Love without restriction because when you love everyone, you are loving God to your fullest potential.
God wants you to love your enemies because the power of that love is greater than any love you’ve ever known. But loving someone who has wronged you or you feel is a terrible person is scary. It requires you to change who you are and what you believe and move forward blindly in love. That sort of commitment can feel overwhelming. But God does not stop loving people when they mess up or do bad things. His love extends to all at all times. His love is perfect, and if you want to love like God, you must strive for that perfection.
God doesn’t expect you to be perfect, and there is no shame in messing up along the way. What He wants is your honest attempt to love perfectly. When you show your commitment to love perfectly, you don’t have to worry about messing up or be afraid. You can have faith that you are following the path God wants you to be on and trust that He will provide you with everything you need to succeed.
Bob learned about a witch doctor in Uganda who mutilated a 10-year-old boy and left him to die. The boy survived, and Bob used his experience as a lawyer to help with the legal proceedings. The witch doctor was tried and convicted, which was a first for the country. Law enforcement and lawyers are typically too afraid of the witch doctors to prosecute. Bob knew this man was a monster, but he also knew that Jesus would want him to show this man love. So Bob started visiting the man in jail and talking to him about God and becoming love. Over time, those lessons changed both men, and together, they were able to spread God’s word to other prisoners and witch doctors and create lasting changes in the lives of the prisoners and Ugandan people.
Loving your enemies is an unthinkable act, but God gives you the unthinkable to show you the power of his love. When you experience the unthinkable, you know that there are no limits to your love. And when there are no limits to your love, you become perfect, like Jesus.
Right now, decide where you want to go with your faith. Decide what relationship you want with God. Make a commitment to get there through love. Call someone you hurt or who has hurt you and show them love. Go out into the world and find someone who needs your love. Visit with someone you fear or who makes you uncomfortable and love them for 30 seconds at a time. Becoming love is intentional. Hoping for a better you is not the same as acting in a better way. Don’t wait for the answers or a perfect time or place. Start loving everyone right now so you can start living the life God granted you.
How do you know who you are as a person? What aspects of your life make up your identity? Maybe it’s your job, the people you surround yourself with, or a certificate or ID. But these things don’t encapsulate the true essence of you. According to Jesus, your identity is based on your ability to love and how you show that love to others. Love is not a thing you seek. It’s something you transform into. And if you only love the people who are easy to love, you’re not fully completing your transformation.
If you want to become love, you must learn to love difficult people, or those you don’t agree with or who make you uncomfortable. You must love everyone without judgment. That doesn’t mean you have to blindly trust and embrace everyone. God granted you the power to discern who brings goodness to your life and who brings toxicity. As part of your gifts from God, it’s okay to differentiate between the two types of people. But God also gave you the power to forgive, understand, and be benevolent. You can be discerning without being demeaning.
It’s not easy to love people you don’t like or are uncomfortable with. When you meet or interact with a difficult person, you likely put up walls to protect yourself. It’s a natural inclination, but it’s not the example Jesus set for you. Loving everyone is easy for Jesus, but you complicate it by believing that you will lose something if you show love to those you oppose, whether it’s security, higher ground, or pride. But to truly walk the path God set out for you, you must overcome your fear. God’s path for you is designed to fill your heart with love and allow you to spread it like bees spread pollen.
(Shortform note: Bob Goff organized Everybody, Always into short chapters for each principle, but many of the chapters overlap in content. Therefore, we’ve organized the chapters into smaller sections within five thematic parts for coherency.)
You’re not likely to meet Jesus as Himself in the living world. But you interact with Jesus every day because Jesus is inside everyone. God made everyone in His image. When you love only the people who are easy to love, you’re only acquainting yourself with part of Jesus. If you want to know Jesus fully, love everyone always.
Jesus advised people to “love thy enemies.” The word “enemies” is not being used literally. You likely don’t have many true enemies, but you do know people who you disagree with or who live different lives than you, maybe even lifestyles you don’t believe in. Those are the people you should love because that is how you truly come to know who you are.
When you start to learn about who you are, you might be scared to look at your weaknesses or areas for growth. You may become lost for a minute as you try to piece yourself together. You don’t need to be ashamed if this happens to you. God isn’t judging you for taking the journey to discover who you are under His love. He doesn’t withhold his love because you’re questioning yours. God knows who you are, and He wants you to discover it. He is with you along the journey and provides guidance for you to find the missing pieces. He knows where the journey ends and wants you to get there so you can become the version of yourself He created you to be.
What stops most of us from taking that journey is our desire to feel confident and validated. We express this through our opinions, which we often force onto others. But you can’t change people by fighting with them, and being right is not the same as showing love. When your love becomes a bridge to close the gap between you and another, not only do you help those around you, but you also find yourself.
God gave you the gift of love because love is your main function. You were made to love others, and it’s an ongoing occupation, not a momentary burst of character found when you decide to live like Jesus. You must push past your comfort zone and reexamine what you believe love means. Love takes work, patience, and modesty, and these actions are harder to fulfill the more disagreeable you find someone. But you must give love to your fullest capacity to live your true life as Jesus intended. To become love, love people as Jesus loves you: unconditionally and always.
Faith is not an easy thing to maintain all the time, but you can simplify the process by approaching life like a child. Jesus told His disciples that they needed to become childlike to make it to the kingdom of God. He was not saying they should become childish. Rather, He meant they shouldn’t fear the unknown. Children are curious by nature and more open to discovering new things in the world than adults are. When you approach your faith with the curiosity of a child, your fears will dissipate.
Put your trust in God with childlike wonder, and you will be able to move forward with love when things become difficult. When you love instead of fear, you can handle the negative events in your life with grace and courage and accept them as part of the path God has set before you. These feelings will pass from you into others and infect them with a similar childlike faith.
Bob Goff uses the example of his relationship with his neighbor Carol to illustrate the power of childlike faith. He and his wife, Maria, were compulsive movers. They lived in six different houses the first 10 years after they were married. But they finally found a place they loved and could settle down in, and this house just happened to be across the street from their current home. When they started interviewing potential buyers for their old home, they were really interviewing potential neighbors.
After many interviews, Bob and his family decided to sell to Carol, a 50-something widow. Carol became like a member of Bob’s family. His kids often played with her and shared their accomplishments with her. Carol, in turn, fed them cookies and looked after them like they were her own.
Because Carol was alone, Bob had a habit of calling to check on her every week. On one of these calls, Carol told him she’d been diagnosed with cancer. Bob was sad and scared, and he could tell she felt the same. Without giving it a second thought, Bob left his home and returned a bit later with walkie-talkies. He gave one to Carol and kept the other for himself.
The walkie-talkies became their new and only form of communication. They felt like kids talking through two cans and a string from different tree houses. They felt silly, which helped them feel childlike, and that feeling helped Carol feel less afraid.
Carol’s cancer fight wasn’t easy, and she often ended up in the emergency room. On one occasion, she was taken in for emergency surgery. Bob snuck into the recovery ward with his walkie-talkies and asked the nurse to put one next to Carol’s bed. He slipped into the other bed in the room and pulled back the curtain. Then, he started calling her name over the walkie-talkie. It was a silly and bizarre thing to do in a hospital, but it made Carol laugh so hard, she cried. That laughter removed her fear and helped her keep her faith.
Love your neighbors like you love yourself. To show yourself love is to love God because you are the embodiment of God’s love, but so is everyone else. You can’t truly love God unless you love all of God, meaning each person who embodies Him.
There is no secret code to solve the riddle of how to love others. Your mission is to find a way to love everyone without fear regardless of who they are. That’s why Jesus asked you to love your neighbors first and foremost because when you learn to overcome the most difficult love hurdles first, your ability to love everyone else grows stronger.
Your neighbors are not merely the people who live next to you. Every person in the world is your neighbor, and you are theirs. They are the store clerk, the mayor, the homeless man on the corner, the mail person, the sexworker, and the local butcher. You have something in common with all of them—you are all part of God’s neighborhood.
It’s not possible to meet and know every living person, but it is possible to love each person you come into contact with. You just have to do it. Start by viewing life as a place for joy, and love becomes the subsequent benefit. In a world full of joy, anger and pride take a backseat to love. In this world, you don’t have to try to control what others think or do, and you stop seeing people as problems and start seeing them as opportunities to grow closer to God. You love people like God when you open yourself up to learning from them.
Carol’s cancer battle raged on and weakened her body. After years of struggling and treatment, the doctor’s told Carol there was nothing more they could do. She was going to die. Bob sat with her in the hospital and reminisced about life. One of the memories they talked about was the annual New Year’s Day parade Bob and his family held in their neighborhood. They started the parade as a way to show their love and appreciation for the people around them. The first year, eight people attended. Twenty-two years later, more than 400 people participated in the short parade down their street.
Carol was too sick to walk the parade route the year before, so Bob had put her in the sidecar of his motorcycle and drove her up and down the street. Everyone knew what Carol was fighting and showered her with attention. She was the hit of the parade. That day in the hospital, Carol told Bob she was going to miss the parades. Bob prayed she would see at least one more.
Carol held on for one more year. When the morning of the parade came, she couldn’t get out of bed. Bob’s children carried her to her living room window to watch the parade pass by. When the parade reached her house, instead of walking by, the route turned onto her front lawn.
Nearly 500 people walked across the yard to the window to say goodbye. Some made funny faces, some bounced balloons off the glass, and some blew kisses. Carol cried and blew each of them kisses back. They were all neighbors that day. They showed Carol love, and she showed it back to them. When she died a few days later, she was wrapped in the spirit of God’s love delivered through her neighbors.
You like to make your own decisions. When someone tells you what to do, you may feel manipulated and resist them. But when someone tells you who you are, you likely try to live up to that image. The same is true for others. Show people who they are, and they will be inspired to become those people.
The problem when we try to direct others’ expectations for their lives is that the result is often inauthentic. For instance, if someone says you need to earn a college degree or have children or get a certain job, you might listen if you respect and love the person. You may even follow through, but your heart's not in it because the decision isn’t yours. You become merely a compliant actor, not an active participant in your life.
Your faith is a lot like your behavior. People will tell you what you should believe, how you should behave, or what you need to do in the name of God. They say you shouldn’t indulge in sinful behavior, watch certain films, or read certain books. They insist that you devote yourself to charitable acts and spread God’s word to everyone you see. They tell you to prove your faith in God by praying daily and showing sinners the way to salvation. But if you follow others’ rules regarding your relationship with God, your faith is no longer real faith.
Real faith is forever. False faith is temporary. Real faith acknowledges that God knows who you are and will provide situations and guidance to help you become that person. He did this many times in the Bible. God helped Moses see that he was a leader, and that’s what Moses became. He showed Noah that he was a sailor, and Noah became a sailor. God will help you find your path to become who you are, and when you commit to your faith and begin to live like God, you must do the same for others. You only need to point people in the right direction by telling them who they are, not how to become that person. Give people faith by helping them see who they can be, and God will do the rest.
When people try to control your life, shame is a significant ensuing consequence. You feel shame when you don’t live up to others’ expectations, and that shame becomes a massive wrench in your ability to love.
Shame forces your words down and makes you turn away from people you love out of pride or embarrassment. You may fear their disappointment or wrath, so you run from them and lose the connection with them, maybe forever. You feel like you can’t communicate with that person anymore or that they no longer love you.
You must not let shame keep you from people you love or from loving people. You must seek out those people and recreate your rhythm with them. Everyone desires forgiveness and acceptance, and they may also feel ashamed about what’s transpired between you. If you communicate with people you’re in a difficult place with, you can celebrate your reunion, rather than despair in your downfall.
The easiest way to avoid shame is by living your life, not the life others set out for you. And the opposite is true. Don’t create a situation for someone else to feel shame because they don’t do what you tell them to or think they ought to do. Remember, becoming love means helping people find who they are, not controlling their behavior. This is how God loves and how He wants you to love in His name.
And you never need to feel shame with God. He shares His hopes with you and shows you how to fulfill them. He loves your heart, not your actions. If you feel disconnected from God or believe you have not lived up to His expectations, don’t run from God. Run toward Him and celebrate your union with Him. He will continue to guide you, even through your missteps, because He is love. And He does this so you will learn how to do the same for others.
Many of us believe we know what’s best for the people in our lives, and some of us extend that belief to people we don’t know. What makes us feel this way, and how can we learn to keep our opinions to ourselves?
Think of the last time you gave someone advice on what they should do with their life. Who was it, and what was the advice?
Why did you feel compelled to advise them? What did you fear would happen if this person didn’t take your advice?
What are two positive characteristics of this person and what they’re capable of?
How can you reshape your advice from an opinion to a statement that might help this person see who they are and still find a positive way forward?
When we mess up or do something to hurt another, we often feel ashamed. This shame makes us vulnerable and afraid to face others, but to stay within a place of love, we must find a way to reach out to those we fear.
What was the last thing you did that made you feel ashamed? Did you hurt someone, act immorally, or screw up something important?
How did you handle the situation after you felt ashamed? How did this reaction affect your life and relationships?
What steps could you take to remove your shame or mend the damage done by your actions?
In what ways would addressing your shame and ensuing personal consequences help your life and relationships moving forward?
When you become love, you acknowledge one very simple truth—we are all with each other in God’s kingdom. That one word “with” is the key to everything. People often feel like fancy prayers or long monologues to God are required to reach him. They’re not. God doesn’t care how dressed-up your language is; what He cares about is how much love you have in your heart and how you show it.
God built a kingdom for all of us to live in, and his desire is for us to build kingdoms within His. Instead, many of us build castles out of the aspects of our lives. Your career, family, friends, and possessions make up the blueprints for your castle. Once you build it, others tell you what a great castle you have, but a castle is not a kingdom. Castles are isolated and protected to keep people out, whereas kingdoms are vast and open to everyone. Kingdoms are created when people come together.
Because kingdoms are open to all people, there will be some you don’t identify with or get. It’s how you treat those people that shows the strength of your faith and love. God knows you won’t always know what to do or how to act, but He showers you with love anyway. You need to do the same for others. You may not understand what others are doing all the time or where they’re coming from in their opinions, but you can still show them love. But you can’t show them love from a turret atop a castle. You must meet them with grace on the ground.
When you see someone trying to build a kingdom by engaging with different types of people, you know that person is becoming love. Their love shines down on everyone equally as respect and deference. They approach people with an open mind and seek to learn from them. Living like God means understanding that we are all with each other, regardless of circumstances.
Your only mission in life is to love the people in front of you. When there’s no agenda to your love, it takes on great power. When you become love, you exhibit the embodiment of God and pull people into your kingdom. And within that kingdom built for everyone, you find heaven.
It’s easy to believe in Jesus and commit to following His example, but it’s much harder to actually live according to His example. A one-time proclamation of devotion to love like Jesus loves is ambitious and commendable, but sticking with it is often as ineffective as sticking to a New Year’s-resolution diet. You may do well for a few weeks or months, but eventually, you burn out. Try loving people for 30 seconds at a time to make sticking to it manageable.
When someone in front of you annoys you or makes you uncomfortable, commit to loving them for the next 30 seconds. When you reach 30 seconds, commit to loving them for 30 more seconds. Commit to living like Jesus for 30 seconds at a time so you are always present in your commitment.
You can use this tactic for all of Jesus's commandments. You might agree with all of them, but trying to obey them all every day without fail is hard. Your pride gets in the way, and you can be overwhelmed by all the ways you’re required to change and grow at once. These feelings will eventually combine into frustration and resentment, and you won’t feel like continuing. Instead, commit to growing and changing 30 seconds at a time.
Bob learned the significance of 30 seconds of focused commitment after he learned how to skydive. His son Adam was an avid skydiver and was doing solo dives on the weekends. Each weekend, Bob watched from the ground as his son free-fell the equivalent of twenty 100-story skyscrapers before deploying his parachute. Bob enjoyed watching his son, but he wanted to do more than observe. He wanted to be with his son, so he took skydiving lessons.
When you’re hurtling through the sky at 140 mph, you have approximately 30 seconds to remember your training and deploy your parachute. You have to take the lessons the instructors have preached during your training and obey them faithfully. If you can do that, you’ll land softly on the ground. But if you can’t, things will go terribly awry.
Most of what Bob learned in skydiving class was what to do when things went wrong. He was told to look up after the parachute deploys to make sure all of the hundreds of strings attached were straight. If just one string was over the top of the parachute, the chute wouldn’t work properly. It would still billow and look good, but it wouldn’t catch the air in the right way, and you would land hard. If you notice a string out of place, you have to cut the entire parachute off and pull the emergency chute. Bob realized the correlation between this instruction and faith.
You’ve likely moved through life believing you’re following Jesus's example with a few strings over the top of your faith. Your actions looked good, but they weren’t helping you move through the world correctly, and you likely landed hard many times.
Cutting your adulterated faith away and starting over feels as daunting as cutting away a perfectly good parachute as you fall toward the ground. But Jesus wants you to become a new version of yourself, one that is love. If there are aspects of your life impeding this ability, you need to cut all of them away and start renewed. Do this each day to ensure you are becoming the best version of yourself and the most complete version of Jesus's love. It only takes 30 seconds to remember Jesus's lessons and follow them faithfully. If you can do this, you will always land the way you’re supposed to.
One final lesson Bob took from skydiving was what happens when the worst-case scenario occurs—neither parachute works. When this happens, you have 45 seconds before you slam into the ground. It’s not the initial impact that will kill you. The initial impact is what breaks your bones, but your body bounces. The second time you hit the ground is what kills you, as your broken bones damage your organs.
This second hit is often what damages your life and those of others when you fail or mess up. You’ve suffered hard falls before, whether in your personal life or your faith, but one mistake isn’t what ruins you or kills your faith. It’s what happens after that matters. After you fall and bounce, if you aren’t caught, the second blow is the fatal one. Maybe the people you thought would catch you didn’t, so your mistakes become irreparable, and your life suffers immensely.
You become love by catching people on the bounce to keep them from the fatal blow. When people mess up or fail in some way, don’t turn from them. Run to them, and reach out with love. Go be with them, not just near them. Your job is not to shame them or try to lecture them about how not to fall or fail. Your job is simply to be there with your arms open like God and trust that He has given you what you need to catch them.
You become love only when you stop pretending you have everything figured out. We all fake it in life at one point or another. We believe we are who we want to be because we’ve declared it so and are good posers. And there’s no shame in posing. You likely aren’t doing it to harm anyone or mislead people. You probably truly believe you have changed and are where you’re supposed to be in life.
When you try to change your life, you make grand statements about what you will do. You repeat over and over again that you will start living in accordance with the word of God. You speak words of affirmation to bolster your success. You take the parts of you that aren’t in line with who you want to be and flip them so you can be someone new. You believe these actions are enough and move forward pretending to be something you’re not. It’s not your fault. You truly want to be that person, but you’re just not truly there yet. And when you’re not truly there with your faith, you can’t become love because God isn’t fooled by your posing.
An example of the detriments of this posing can be found in the Bible story of Ananias and Sapphira. The couple owned land and decided to sell it and give the money away to help the people in their community. They told everyone what they were doing over and over again, and when the time came, they sold the land and gave the money to a man named Peter. Peter asked if they’d given all the money, and Ananias confirmed that they had. But that wasn’t true. He’d kept a little of it for him and his wife. At that moment, Ananias and Sapphira dropped dead.
The lesson in this story isn’t to fear God’s wrath if you lie. The story doesn’t say why they dropped dead, but one could argue that God saw Ananias pretending to be someone he wasn’t and refused to let it happen. For Ananias’s part, he likely wasn’t trying to be shady. He and his wife probably really wanted to be the type of people who would give everything they had away to help others. And the amount of money they kept was probably small enough to not truly harm this intention. They’d carried that hope and stated their intentions enough that they may have actually believed they’d fulfilled their word. But they hadn’t, and they suffered for it.
It’s easy to hope to be a better person and to extend that hope to the betterment of other’s lives, but hope is not the same as action. When you rely on hope, you believe you’re actually becoming a better person without doing anything. But every time you pose as this person, your actions are inauthentic. You likely won’t be struck down by God, but you will continue to face challenges to truly becoming love because God knows who you are and that you’re not truly with Him yet.
God will continue to present you with opportunities to drop the act and be real about who you are and what you do. He wants you to succeed in becoming the person He made you to be and finds joy in your honest attempts, even if you stumble at times. But you can’t truly become who you’re meant to be if you’re not honest about who currently are. When you’re dishonest with yourself and God, you will never be able to reach the best version of yourself God has in store for you. Stop pretending and acknowledge that you’re trying to become love and are still figuring it out. God will continue to provide everything you need to eventually get there.
When you become love, you stop collecting examples of the ways in which you’ve shown love. You realize that showing love is not a path to God’s good graces but a means to please God and serve him faithfully. But too often, people keep track of their good deeds. They mark a point on their scorecards to prove to Jesus that they’re living with grace, and they believe that a certain number of points will equate to receiving more love from Jesus. Jesus's grace is not something to be won or purchased with points. Becoming love means you stop making love about you and make it about Jesus.
Bob uses the example of a pizza parlor, ala Showbiz Pizza, where you can win tickets for playing games, to demonstrate this point. He and his children collected tickets for years, and when he went to turn them in, he was sure a great reward waited for them. Instead, when he turned in almost a thousand tickets, he received a pencil with no eraser. The tickets, which seemed so valuable, were actually worthless.
When you collect your good deeds as leverage for Jesus's love, you make your actions about nothing more than receiving validation. You are not confident in God’s love for you and seek to earn it by proving your love through various accomplishments. But God does not want a series of accomplishments, He wants you to become love in your hearts.
Boasting about your accomplishments is also not becoming love. You are, again, seeking external validation for how good you are, and this makes everything you do about you, not love for the sake of love. You don’t need to attach words like “ministry” or “charity” to your actions. Don’t attach any words to them. See your behavior as an extension of the love God has blessed you with. Give your love to everyone without conditions and without making it about you. God has created a world full of love, and your only task is to become the embodiment of that in the unique way He's granted you.
We tend to believe that we are only validated when others witness our behavior. We perform on the stage of life to audiences of those around us. When we do, we pay more attention to how big our stage is than how big our actions are. When you become love, you don’t need applause or validation for the things you do because you know just doing beautiful things is enough.
Additionally, sometimes you choose the wrong stage for important conversations or actions. If you’re always searching for the perfect platform by which to express your faith, you will likely never find it. The perfect platform is the world God made. It’s around you all the time.
You become love when you surround yourself with words and habits that exhibit love, forgiveness, benevolence, and generosity. You allow the communication of positivity to become a daily practice regardless of where you are or who’s around. And the more you practice communicating love, the more it becomes an inherent part of who you are. You don’t have to wait for a stage or a performance, you just live as love.
Humans are hardwired for memorization. With practice and repetition, you take in the details of certain behavior and create a sort of muscle memory for it. Living like Jesus is the same. Each time you intentionally choose to live as love, you sketch that feeling and behavior into your mental fabric. After a while, you don’t even realize you’re doing these things. You don’t have to worry about trying to remember how to be loving. Your muscle memory takes over, and your actions become automatic. When that happens, you’ve become love.
The great thing about stepping down from the stage and ceasing individual performances is that you stop feeling like a failure if you mess up. In front of an audience, the pressure to be perfect is high. If you screw up, you feel ashamed and embarrassed. But in God’s world, you can miss a step or play the wrong note, and no one will be the wiser. You don’t have to hang your head because the next moment and next day are open to try again. God doesn’t expect you to be perfect, and you shouldn’t either. He just wants you to move in the direction of becoming love, and only through practice and removing the pressure of perfection will you be able to allow for mistakes that help you grow and improve.
When you understand that messing up and trying again is part of becoming love, you also find it easier to allow others the same freedom. People will mess up or play the wrong note, but that doesn’t mean you can’t learn something from these people or their mistakes. Stay with those people and give them space to try again. Become love by helping others if they need it, but don’t try to show them what to do. Being with others is enough to show them grace and help them experience the depth of your faith, which can help them see the depth of their own.
God does not want us to be perfect. He wants us to try to live with love. But our fear of failing and our shame often impede our growth. We must learn to see failure as a foundation from which to grow.
Think of a recent time when you felt like a failure. What were the circumstances and how did you fail?
Who else was affected by your perceived failure, and how were they affected?
What lessons did you take away from this event that opened a path for personal growth?
How would you behave differently if you believed your failure was part of God’s path for you?
In what way will you approach your failures and those of others differently in the future?
It’s easier said than done to promise to love everyone all the time, so the moments when you are able to feel significant. You may want to boast about the good things you’ve done for others, but you need to learn to love without external validation.
When you do extraordinary things for other people, do you tell your friends and family about them? Why or why not?
In what ways do you feel that doing good things for others benefits your life?
When was the last time you did something good for someone who was in need, and why did you do it?
If there were no one to acknowledge your good deeds and you didn’t believe in spiritual rewards, would you still help people? Why or why not?
You like to play it safe most of the time. It’s natural to feel more comfortable making moves when you have all the answers you think you need to move forward safely. You want assurances that things will work out before you take a leap. But recognize that the leap you finally take is not a leap of faith. There’s a difference between staying safe and being safe. When you lack faith and only do what is comfortable, you don’t grow. You stay where you are as the same person. God wants you to learn and grow under His love, and the only way to do that is to have faith in His love.
God doesn’t give you uncertainty and hardships because He enjoys watching you struggle. He does this because He knows overcoming obstacles is the only way for you to learn about yourself and move forward to a better place. Becoming love means understanding that discomfort and struggle are God’s way of helping you grow in your faith. He wants you to be brave. He wants you to realize that you are the embodiment of His love, and as such, you can take risks and manage fear because you know it brings you closer to Him.
Think of your faith like the green lights that let a pilot know his landing gear is locked and ready. Bob learned this lesson the hard way one night while piloting a plane from Palm Springs to his hometown near San Diego. He played it very safe on the way there, intentionally flying 2,000 miles above the highest obstruction on the route to make sure he cleared it and stayed alive. He did the same thing on the way home, assuming these precautions would be enough to avoid any accidents.
When he was back home and ready to land, he flipped on the landing gear. But instead of seeing three green lights, one for each back wheel and the one nose wheel, he saw two—just the lights for the back wheels. He radioed to the tower for help, but there was nothing they could do. It was late at night, and they couldn’t tell whether the nose wheel was down or not.
Bob panicked. The options for avoiding danger were slim to none, and the two options he had—land without nose gear or keep flying—didn’t carry positive outcomes. He didn’t know what to do, and he realized much of life was like that moment. You can make all sorts of plans to make sure you are safe, but what you expect to happen often doesn’t turn out the way you wanted. These are the moments when your faith is put to the test.
You often wait for those green lights in life. Those green lights tell you that everything is okay and it’s safe to move forward. Maybe you want something negative in your life to stop and something better to come in. So you do what you feel you need to do to make that happen and feel good about the outcome. But what happens when all your plans blow out the window and all your preparation didn’t lead to the desired result? What if one of your lights doesn’t come on? You likely panic and start circling the environment looking for another solution.
What you don’t realize is that your green lights are already turned on. Your life and faith are the only green lights you need to move forward. When you become fixed on one path or one solution, you thwart God’s larger plan for you. His plan is not ruined because yours is. His plan is working exactly as He wants it to work. He gave you the ability to ask questions and have hopes and desires, but He also gave you fortitude, courage, and strength. He helps you discover those by forcing you to adapt in the moment.
You can’t predict the outcome of all your actions. You can expect a certain result, but you shouldn’t put your energy into waiting for that result to happen. Put your energy into what you know is already true and the answers you already have. When you have true faith, you know that God loves you and wants you to succeed. You can see everything that happens as part of his plan and put your weight behind that. If you can do that, you don’t need to wait for the right time to act or move forward. The right time is now because God may not bring about the same lesson twice, and if you miss your chance to learn that lesson, you’ve missed a chance to grow.
You don’t need as many green lights as you think you do. Make yourself vulnerable to life. Be okay with doubts and be honest about them. God doesn’t care how assured you pretend to be. He cares about what you’re doing to become love, and admitting doubt and fear are part of that process. Take a true leap of faith so God can lead you to the place you’re meant to land.
Bob took that leap that night at the airport. He didn’t have as many green lights as he wanted, but he had faith in God and approached the landing strip as slowly as he could. He angled the plane so the back wheels would touch first and the nose would follow. Either the front of the plane would crash and blow apart or he’d bounce on the one wheel. He eased the back wheels down, and the nose bounced a second later. Turns out, the green light for the nose gear was burned out. His wheel had been down the whole time.
If you wait for confirmation before acting in life, you’re letting a cheap burned out bulb stop you from your destiny. Don’t let your expectations stymie your growth. Put the plane on the ground full of faith in God’s love and guidance.
When you look down the road of your life, you probably only see a few steps ahead at a time. You use the information gathered from this short distance to guide your actions. You move ahead again until it’s time to stop and peer farther down until you see the next set of steps. When you move through life in this measured way, you’re not living with faith, which means you’re not becoming love. Real faith gives you the strength to follow the road of your life blindly.
One of Bob’s friends is a blind track star named Lex, who is a para-Olympian and World Champion in the long jump. It might seem impossible for a blind person to compete in the long jump, which requires seeing the end of the track and the platform from which to launch your body through the air. But Lex has a partner he trusts who points him in the right direction. The partner then calls to Lex from next to the sandpit so he knows when to jump. This blind trust allows Lex to compete at the highest levels and succeed.
Jesus is like Lex’s partner. He points you in the right direction and asks you to trust Him as you move forward. That trust is the epitome of faith. Jesus wants you to run toward His voice at the edge of your life with all your strength, believing that you will know when to jump and will land safely. But this task is not always easy. You hear many voices that have an opinion about who you are and where you’re headed. Some of those voices are negative. They say you’ll never accomplish what you want to do or don’t have the abilities needed. They’ll make you fear failing, and when you do fail, they’ll show you why you should never try again.
You must learn to parse through these voices and find Jesus’s voice. His voice is the only one you need to listen to. Along your journey to live as God, you will wander from the path and become afraid. You will stop moving or find that your steps are smaller than before. You may trip and fall for no discernible reason. These things will happen, but it’s okay when they do. Making it down the path correctly and in record time is not what God delights in. He is happiest when He sees you taking steps, even small ones, and when you pick yourself up when things haven’t gone as you hoped. His voice will not leave you if you stray from the path, and if you listen for it, Jesus will guide you back to where you belong.
Sometimes, Jesus’s voice will come in the form of a friend, like Lex’s partner. God sends you people you can trust to help guide your life. But it can be hard to recognize those people if you’re not honest about what you’re seeing and not seeing. Take the example from the Bible about a blind man who was healed by Jesus. Jesus touched him once and asked what the man saw. The man, risking insult to Jesus’s healing powers, said he saw people who looked like trees walking around. Jesus touched him again, and the man’s full vision was restored so he could see the world as it actually was.
When you become love, you are working with that second touch. The trick is you have to be honest about what you see and don’t see after that first touch. Your first encounter with a person may not be great. Maybe you don’t understand their perspective on life or their attitude and actions. But if you are honest about your confusion or differences, you can have a second encounter that helps you see their worldview more clearly or at least better understand it. From this place, you can give them love, and trust is formed.
Pay attention to the people you meet and wait for that second touch. This person might be the trusted voice God sent to help you grow and move farther down the road.
If someone asked you who you were, would you know how to answer? Would you answer honestly or let your pride call the shots? Many of us like to pretend we’re different than we actually are. And many of us do this when we express our faith and relationship with God.
You know you’ve lost your way with God when having a certain kind of faith becomes more important than the faith itself. God is always trying to guide you in the direction that leads to your authentic self. He provides circumstances that allow you to see where you are with Him and what that says about who you’re becoming or need to become. But when you fake your relationship with God, you close the door to His guiding light.
The problem is your words express a certain image that your actions don’t live up to. You pretend to be with God, but your ego is really driving your behavior. You’re not becoming the person God wants you to be. You’re not becoming love. To truly be with God, you need to be honest about where you are in your faith and who you are in the moment. You have an open invitation from God to swap out your former self and become the person He knows you to be. Your new identity is always waiting for you, but you must become love if you want to achieve it.
When you are truly becoming love, you know that the most important way to be with God is by showing love to others, even people who are difficult to love. You stop moving through the world believing that you are the center of it. You stop forcing your opinions on others and give them grace and compassion instead. You stop merely seeing what someone else is going through and start being with them in their pain. Becoming love is the only way to truly know who you are because when you start to love others freely, you become aligned with your true identity—a representation of God’s love.
This is what God wants from you. As you start the work of bringing others into your grace, God provides you with more grace to give. You’ve been granted the opportunity to live in this world and become love. Everything that happens in your life is a chance God has granted you to become your true self. You don’t need to waste time wondering who you are or arguing with others about your differences. You just need to open your arms, and God will show you who you are and where you need to go.
God doesn’t care about the things you don’t have. He doesn’t grant you only a sliver of His love if you don’t have much to offer Him. He wants you to use what you have to feel all His love and use it in your life.
You likely get bogged down about what is missing from your life. You allow these believed deficiencies to define you and keep you from seeing what else is possible. But when you focus on what you don’t have, you lead your life down the wrong path. The body follows the head, and when you turn your head away from God’s love, you walk away from your faith.
Bob shares the story of Karl, a young man who lost all movement in his arms and legs in high school after a diving accident. Karl went from being an athletic young man full of mischief and hope to someone who only had use of his eyes, mind, and tongue. He was given a special chair to operate using a straw and was sent out into the world to learn how to live in his new body.
Karl didn’t let his paralysis keep him from making something of his life. He understood what he had to work with and offered it up to God with love. What he received was more love and guidance for his path forward. Karl and Bob graduated from law school together. Karl went on to work for the California attorney general’s office. He argued and won five cases in front of the California Supreme Court and made great strides in changing laws that affected millions.
Karl’s journey represents someone who refused to be limited by what they no longer had. He had no choice but to look inside himself and offer up what he could to God. He had faith that God would help him make something with what he still had, and He did.
Many of us have the use of our arms and legs and could use them to help other people, but we don’t. We have the gift of sight and can see people suffering around us, but we watch from a distance, rather than jumping into action to make a difference. We can intellectually understand pain and hardship, but we don’t act on that understanding, only empathize with others’ pain and hardships. We’re not limited in our abilities. We’re limited by how we choose to use them.
Like Karl, we need to remove the limitations from our psyches and use our minds to see the possibilities in ourselves and others. Remove doubts and distractions. Forget about what others think and your desire for approval.
People who become love still suffer hardships, just like you. But when you become love, you stop seeing setbacks as limitations. You stop focusing on what went wrong or is missing and stop defining yourself by those things. Instead, you put your faith in God’s plan for you to become who you are meant to be and offer up what you do have to receive grace and guidance. You don’t need arms and legs to become love. You just need to turn your head toward love, and your life will follow.
You likely have specific questions you want answers to, and when you ask God those questions, you wait for an answer. But you can’t hear God’s voice, and maybe you believe that means He isn’t listening. Chances are you aren’t really waiting for God’s literal voice, but rather instructions or a boost of confidence to be able to feel good about what you’re doing. But God is already confident that you know what to do. His silence or lack of “signs” does not signify his indifference or lack of love for you. He knows you will grow more in your faith and life if you try to find courage on your own.
While you’ve been waiting for God to speak, He's been waiting for you to act. When God is silent, He is still communicating with you. Your faith lets you understand that His silence means you have everything you need and know everything you need to know to follow your path. But to understand the power of this silence, you also need to be silent. Clear your head of doubts, distractions, and external noise, and in the beautiful quiet, you will find God.
All of your successes and failures have not been random. God doesn’t expect you to do everything perfectly. Becoming love doesn’t mean loving everyone the right way all the time. God’s delight is in your commitment to His love and attempts to live within it. The manners in which you either fail or succeed are your lessons. What you learn from those experiences help you grow and bring you closer to your faith. Your life up to this point has prepared you for everything there is to come, and when God is silent, He’s watching from above, sending you his grace without interference because He believes you’ve got this.
When you become love, you understand God’s belief in you, and it gives you strength. You recognize that you don’t need as much guidance as you think you do. All any of us really need is someone who believes in us. Hopefully, you have other people God has sent to your life that know you as well as He does and trust you to find your own way through life. You may not always understand what’s happening to you, but when you’re surrounded by the trust of others, you can trust in yourself to figure out what to do and do it.
You are not unique in your desire to approach life with caution or fear. And you are not the only one who doesn’t understand God’s plan for you at all times. But when you become love, you understand that God has given you compassion, love, and patience with yourself and others. You can take the trust God has in you and turn that into belief in another. When you become love, you always know the way forward because it is bathed in God’s love.
Look around your life. What are you afraid to do? What have you always wanted to try but didn’t know how? Who are you hiding from or wish you could connect with? Who has wronged you or broken your heart? Where is your compassion needed? Who needs someone to believe in them? Believe that God has given you everything you need to live your authentic life, and carry that trust forward as you give love to everyone you know and don’t know. You already have the power of God in you. He’s waiting for you to use it.
It’s not always possible to know how to make your desires a reality, and things don’t always go the way you want them to. But remembering to have faith can help you feel less afraid of taking chances.
What is one recent moment where something you expected to happen didn’t?
Describe your reaction. What emotions did you experience? What actions did you take?
Do you feel differently about that experience now than you did then? In what way?
What is something you want to do now but are scared of? Why are you scared?
What are some certainties that you can put your faith in to help you feel less afraid of taking this risk?
It’s not always easy to know how to help others, especially if we feel ill-equipped for the challenge. But we all have something to offer that can be useful to others.
What are some ways in which you’ve helped others experiencing hardships recently?
What are some other ways you might be of service to others who need help?
What would you like to do to help others but believe you’re unable to do? Why do you believe this?
Do you believe you have limitations that keep you from accomplishing your goals? What are they?
How can you view those limitations in a different way and still move forward toward your goals?
When you get to heaven, rumor has it you’ll have a conversation with Jesus. Through this conversation, you’ll hear about the things you didn’t understand while you were alive. You’ll learn about the many ways Jesus came into your life, and your entire perspective of how you’ve lived will change. The most surprising thing you’ll learn are the many forms Jesus took and how many times you actually met Him.
In anticipation of this conversation, you likely have a list of accomplishments you want to tout. You’ll talk about all of the good things you did for certain people, and you’ll hope it was enough. But what you’ll find out is that all people are Jesus. Everyone you meet is Jesus, so if you truly want to love Jesus, you must love everyone like you would Him.
But there is more to it than that. Loving easy people is easy. Jesus intentionally puts people in the world that challenge your beliefs or safety or time. How you treat those people is the real measure of how well you love God. The people who are needy, poor, in jail, living less than moral lives, holding differing opinions, and living different lives are the ones through which you are meant to prove your faith in God’s love.
There are two types of people: the ones who will learn that the people they loved were Jesus and those who will realize the people they chose not to love were Jesus. You, like everyone, likely fall into the second category most of the time. And your intention was likely not to be mean or spiteful. If you’d known it was Jesus, you would have dropped everything to help. But you didn’t, and you let other things, like fear or your busy life, get in the way of showing love.
Treating everyone as though they are Jesus is God’s plan for you. If you truly want to go deep in your faith and be with Jesus, you must treat everyone like they’re Jesus. It’s not easy, but when you become love, it gets a lot easier. You need to realize that when you give love away to everyone, you are acting in accordance with who God made you to be. You are doing it for God, not for yourself.
You don’t need to wait for a plan or a sign for who to help and how to do it. Love is the plan. Find people who need help. Seek out people on the fringe and give whatever love you can. Visit people in jail or hand out water to people who are thirsty. God’s plan is simple. Don’t complicate it with fears or confusion. Set the intention to love everybody, and you will be fulfilling your true purpose in life. Your conversation with Jesus will be one you can be proud of.
When you become love, you give over part of your life to those in need. You make room in your world for others, even if you don’t think you have room. Becoming love means getting used to having your world disrupted in ways you didn’t imagine, but these disruptions are where your faith lives and your grace. You might feel like grace is too high a price to pay if your world is thrown out of whack because of it, but what price would you pay to know you were serving Jesus and living your life’s purpose?
In the back of Love Does, Bob’s previous book, he listed his phone number. He wanted to make himself available like Jesus does. He gets dozens of phone calls a week from people, and he takes them all. He even takes them while he’s working because he knows becoming love means being fully accessible to people when they’re in need.
One day, a man from prison called his number by accident. But while they were on the phone, the man asked Bob to call two people—the man’s girlfriend and mother. Bob made the calls using a third-party system to connect the man with his loved ones, and both were a disaster. The girlfriend didn’t come to the phone, and the mother hung up after the man said he loved her. Bob felt his heart wrench for this man. He asked him what he was looking for with these calls, and the man said he needed someone to buy him an ankle bracelet so he could be released. Without a second thought, Bob agreed to buy it for him.
That day, the cost of Bob’s grace was $9.95 for the phone call and a large chunk of money for the bracelet, but he didn’t worry about it. He could help someone who’d asked for it, so he did, like Jesus would want him to. Afterward, Bob never heard from the man again, and that was also okay with him. He didn’t need anything from this man, and he didn’t help him so he could get a pat on the back from others for his good deed. He told his wife and that was it.
This experience reminded Bob of two things: 1) Jesus already knows what you’re doing, so you don’t need to wow Him with stories of your grand gestures, and 2) becoming love is like playing the part of a tree in a play, as Bob had done as a child. The tree is not the hero or the antagonist of the story. The tree has no lines and gets no credit for being a tree. Your only job as the tree is to stand tall and move your arms when directed to. It’s pretty simple.
Likewise, when you’re simply a tree in someone’s life, your only job is to stand tall and await directions, then perform them to the best of your ability. You don't need to be the victim or hero or receive applause. You just need to love. Jesus wants you to participate in the play of life that He is the star in. Play your part well, and don’t ruin the performance by demanding credit in the playbill.
When you get to heaven and talk with Jesus, you can both have a good chat about all the ways you gave love to others. There won’t be fanfare or a parade to salute you. You will simply have the satisfaction of knowing you did what you could to live the way Jesus wanted you to live. And at the end of the day, if it costs you time, comfort, or $9.95, the price will be worth the reward.
There’s a children’s book that centers around the concept that your life is a bucket, and you become whatever you put in the bucket. You may be thinking about what you want to put in your bucket so you can become that thing. But stop for a moment and ask yourself, “What could I fill my bucket with to make life good for the people around me?”
Becoming love means making God’s world a place where everyone can experience His love, not just you. You can fill your bucket up with parties and become popular. You can fill your bucket up with complaints and become an unhappy person. Or you can fill your bucket up with love and become God. Which bucket do you think serves more than just you?
Ask the people you love how your life is working for them. If they’re honest, you’ll understand what you need to put in your bucket to become love for them. Bob asked his family how his life worked for them and got a surprising answer. He’d always been impatient, but he never felt bothered by it. But his family did, so he decided to fill his bucket with patience. To hammer the matter home, he carried a bucket with him as a reminder.
One day, he was leaving a sermon he’d just given at a church in Texas and was rushing to make it home in time for the Super Bowl. He drove to the rental-car return and became stuck in a slow-moving line. He didn’t understand what was taking so long until he looked out the window. He saw the attendant working at a turtle’s pace. Twenty-five minutes and a missed flight later, he was ready to burst. Then, he noticed his bucket on the passenger seat. He decided to fill it with patience, and when he finally reached the front, instead of unloading a storm of annoyance on the worker, he complimented him and wished him well.
Later, the same worker caught up to Bob and told him what a great sermon he’d given earlier that day. The man had been in the audience of one of several sermons Bob gave at the church. If Bob had acted the way he initially wanted to, the wise and benevolent man this worker had seen spreading God’s love would have fizzled. Bob may have released his frustration if he’d yelled at the man, but that conversation would not have worked for the man. It likely would have damaged him and made him lose faith.
You can pretend to be a wonderful person in front of an audience and tell yourself how much you love God and how deep your faith is. But if you step down from that pedestal and treat the people you believe don’t matter without grace, you know your faith is not where it needs to be. You’re not there yet with God.
How you treat the people around you says a lot about who you are. You need to act in a way that works for others, and in doing so, you will ensure that your actions always work for you, too. The more love you give, the more you become love. How you deal with negativity and strife will dictate whether you stay stuck in one place or grow into your true self. God is not grading your performance or demanding perfection. He just wants you to fill your bucket with love so others will recognize Him when they see you.
Jesus's prayer was for us to come together as one, the way He did with God. There are many religious denominations that all aim to serve God. This common goal makes all denominations one church. You can be with others without needing to be the same as them.
In the grand church of Jesus, no one is turned away because of differences or mistakes. There are no rules to follow beyond treating everyone with love, and no one is excluded. But some have taken God’s love to be different for different people. Buildings were constructed in His honor, and separation of His worshippers became the standard practice. But God told you that He doesn’t exist in buildings. He is inside of every person He made in His image.
Excluding people or admonishing them for their lives is not fulfilling God’s purpose. When you shun people who are not like you, you betray Jesus. Jesus doesn’t want you to fight in His name. He wants you to love in a way that makes others feel as though they are in God’s presence.
The true nature of a church is coming together with God and each other. There is no specific location required. Where there is a group gathered to do God’s work, there is a church. Even if you don’t literally attend church, if you seek to become love and live as Jesus did, you are part of the church of God.
God refers to His church as his bride. The symbolism is one of an intimate relationship that exists forever. He loves you unconditionally, even your flaws, and accepts you for who you are. A bride is beautiful and enchanting. No one criticizes a bride; they stand in awe of her. To truly be part of God’s church, put away your differences, and recognize one another as the brides you are.
You don’t need to be afraid when you encounter difficult circumstances or people in your life. God told all His disciples to “be not afraid,” and He meant it. Often, you receive the most grace and understanding about yourself when you go through difficult times. But if you don’t have the nerve or courage to move forward during struggles, you’ll miss out on all the good that follows.
Bob does charitable work in Uganda, part of which is providing legal services for people in need. On one trip, he met a chief justice and learned about a frightening aspect of Ugandan life. For more than a century, the Ugandan people have lived in fear of witch doctors. The witch doctors believe that the flesh of children has magical properties, and they perform ceremonies using this flesh. To get the flesh, they abduct children.
A witch doctor has never stood trial in Uganda for their crimes. The people who’ve lost children are too afraid of the witch doctors’ powers to press charges, and the lawyers and judges are too afraid to prosecute. When Bob met with the chief justice, he asked if he could be part of a witch doctor trial if one ever happens, and the justice agreed.
The next time Bob visited Uganda, he learned about a 13-year-old girl who’d been in prison for two years awaiting trial. She was accused of kidnapping after a witch doctor tricked the girl into bringing her a baby. The girl saved the baby when she discovered the witch doctor was not the baby’s mother, but she was arrested. Nothing had happened to the doctor.
Bob took the case and was able to get the girl released from prison. He saw it as a warning to the witch doctors that he was not afraid of them. He felt in his heart that, one day, they would try and convict one of these witch doctors. And when that time came, he would not be afraid. He was following God’s plan, so there was nothing to fear.
What if you weren’t ever afraid again? You will experience moments when you’re lost, confused, and anxious. But if you’re honest with God and have faith in His love, you’ll understand that something good waits on the other side of your courage. When you become love with God, you no longer have anything to fear.
It’s so easy to get caught up in our own lives, we forget that our lives affect the lives of others. But if we commit to becoming love, we will learn how to fill our buckets to become positive people for those around us.
What would you say your two biggest character flaws are? What evidence supports this belief?
What would you suspect the people close to you would say about what your character flaws are? What makes you believe this?
What could you put in your bucket to help you become love in the world? Name two things.
What would your behavior look like if your bucket was filled with those things? How would that change the way you interact with others?
There are things we want in life but are too afraid to ask for, and there are things we want to do but are too afraid to try. If we want to grow and reach our potential, we need to stop being afraid.
What is one thing you want to do but believe you can’t? What fears keep you from trying?
Are you someone who takes risks? If yes, what risks have you taken? If no, why not?
What are you most afraid of in your life? How does that fear keep you from moving forward?
What can you do to overcome that fear so you can become the person you want to be?
As you’ve learned, if you want to live a life that fulfills your purpose to God, you must love your enemies. Of all the ways God wants us to become love, you may find this one to be the most difficult. Your enemies are likely cruel and selfish. They may be arrogant or do terrible things to others. But Jesus doesn’t turn his back on anyone. There is nothing you can do that will make Jesus stop loving you, and the same is true for your enemies. God is the epitome of perfection, and part of that perfection is His continued love for hard-to-love people. Therefore, if you want to become love, you must strive for this same type of perfection.
You probably think the idea of being perfect is as far-fetched as pigs flying. No one is perfect, right? You might do your best to be nice to people and only say bad things behind their backs. You may have the ability to forgive people who’ve harmed you, at least superficially. You perform these actions because you think they make you a better person, but when your heart is not fully open and benevolent, you aren’t truly changing. If you can’t learn to love your enemies, you will always fall shy of becoming the best version of yourself. The question you need to ask yourself is whether you simply believe in Jesus or desire to be like Jesus. Perfection only comes when your love has no limits.
Bob finally got his day in court with a Ugandan witch doctor. A man named Kabi, the head of the witch doctors in that particular region, kidnapped an 8-year-old boy and mutilated him. He left the boy for dead, but the boy survived.
Bob thought he’d have to look for a long time for a judge willing to preside over a trial against a witch doctor, but he found one within a week. This judge knew the risks and had a certain amount of fear, but he wanted to see justice against a witch doctor for the first time. He knew being brave for the greater good was more important than being safe. He chose love over fear.
During the first-ever witch doctor trial, the young boy stood in the courtroom and pointed to Kabi as the man who tried to kill him. This may seem like a small thing, but Kabi was a walking ghost, and his eyes showed pure evil. He was scary to the adults in the room, but the boy, who had the most right to be afraid, acted courageously. The verdict of guilty came in, and news of the first imprisonment of a witch doctor spread through the nation.
There would be ripple effects. Others might see that it was possible to get justice for their children. More judges might be willing to preside over these types of cases. The wheels of justice were turning, and it was all due to an 8-year-old’s bravery.
Bob struggled with loving Kabi. Kabi was definitely his enemy and a terrible person, but simply writing him off in that way felt wrong. He knew Jesus wanted him to love Kabi, but that also felt wrong. Still, he saw that in trying to love Kabi, he would be getting closer to living like Jesus. He was afraid of those feelings, but he knew there was nothing to fear if he became love. And he decided if a small boy can be courageous enough to change his country, he could be brave enough to love his enemy.
You may not always understand the things that happen to you or that happen in the world, but understanding is not your purpose. You don’t have to have all the answers to see the power of God’s love. If you stop seeking explanations and certainties and allow God’s love to work in your life, you will witness amazing miracles. God uses the unthinkable to show you just how powerful His love is. And when you see this power at work, you will know that unthinkable things are possible for you when you become love.
Bob felt his faith and love grow bigger because of two ensuing unthinkable things that happened regarding the little boy in Uganda. One day, he received a phone call from a surgeon in Los Angeles named Randy. This man was one of a few specialized surgeons capable of performing miracles. He’d recently reattached a man’s severed hand and given the man full functioning again. Randy had heard about the Ugandan boy and wanted to help. Not only was he offering to help fix the boy’s mutilated body parts, he would do it for free.
Bob flew to Uganda and became the boy’s legal guardian. He took the boy from the Ugandan bush to the airport and watched the wonder in the boy’s eyes seeing his first airplane. During their layover in London, Bob received an email. Somehow, word of the boy’s situation had reached the White House, and President Obama wanted to meet him. Two days earlier, the boy had been in the bush. Now, he was the invited guest of the president of the United States.
When Bob and the boy arrived at the hospital in Los Angeles, Bob leaned down and whispered something in his ear before he was wheeled into surgery. He told the boy to be not afraid. Eight hours later, the boy was in the recovery room. The surgery had been a success.
Bob could never have expected this turn of events, but he understood that God doesn’t just work in mysterious ways. He works in ways that blow our minds. Bob took this demonstration of the extent of God’s power and decided that if he wanted to experience more of this greatness, he had to risk more of his faith.
A little while later, Bob was back in Uganda. He went to the prison where Kabi was living on death row and asked to visit him. This was the last place Bob ever expected to be, but he knew it was the only place he was supposed to be if he wanted to become love. When Kabi entered the room, he immediately said how sorry he was for what he’d done to the boy. He explained how he’d been raised by a witch doctor and had become consumed by his teachings. He knew he would never be free again, but he wanted forgiveness before he died.
Bob didn’t know if forgiveness was possible for this monster. But he felt an energy move through him that reminded him that Jesus accepted everyone, even those who’d done wrong. That day, Bob opened himself up and talked with Kabi about Jesus. He told Kabi what he was learning about becoming love and the role of forgiveness in that process. Kabi was interested in finding his own path under Jesus. He was having his “come to Jesus” moment, and in witnessing this transformation, Bob was too.
Bob continued to meet with Kabi. As they continued to talk, he saw that they were not so different after all. Yes, they were not the same type of person, but they struggled in similar ways trying to become the men they were meant to be. They decided to hold a sermon for the 3,000 prisoners on death row, and Kabi delivered it, albeit a rough version of Jesus's teachings.
After the sermon, men came forward to be washed of their sins. Kabi took a water bottle and baptized all of them while Bob watched. Bob understood that the men saw a miracle in front of them. They knew who Kabi was, and they knew that Bob had been the one to put Kabi away. To see the two men standing side by side was proof of God’s love, and they were moved to believe.
Bob was also affected by the scenario. If Kabi could make this massive change in his life, then anyone could, even him. He realized the way we understand our faith and God’s teachings is not what’s important. Our understanding doesn’t have to be perfect for us to become perfect like God. At the end of the afternoon at the prison, Kabi told Bob he forgave him. Bob was stunned both by the action and implication, but he was also in awe. Kabi realized that to be with God, he had to love like God, which meant loving his enemies. Bob looked at him and no longer saw that monster. He saw someone becoming God by becoming love.
To continue your journey in becoming love, two important questions to ask yourself are, “Who am I becoming, and where do I want to go?” The answer you seek may or may not be an actual location, but the purpose of going to wherever you want to go should satisfy the answer to the first question—love. When you get to where you want to go, the person you find there will be a version of you growing closer to God.
Don’t limit your responses to places you believe you can get to easily. Really think about who you need to become to grow more in your faith. Even if the emotional state or physical location seems hard and impossible to arrive at, set your intention to get there. God is your tour guide on your journey to love, and when God is your guide, you know you can always trust the path He leads you down.
If it’s a difficult path, you might stumble along the way. Don’t worry about it. Focusing too much on where you step hinders your ability to see what’s happening around you. Commit to following God through the difficult terrain of your life without caution. If you stumble, you’ll fall into God. He will help you regain your balance and continue moving forward. The unsteady path is the only way to grow in your faith. If faith were like a scooter ride down a sidewalk, your journey would be quick and easy. You wouldn’t need to grow because there would be no obstacles to overcome.
You, like everyone else, likely believe that action equals progress, which is not wholly wrong. Approving of Jesus's message is not the same as living the way Jesus lived. But sometimes becoming love means slowing down so you make sure you’re always following Jesus, not dragging Him behind you. Be patient with the process and your progress. It doesn’t matter how fast you get there. Your growth in your faith does not have an endpoint. Your task is to continue to be led by God’s love and eventually be able to stumble less often.
You can also be a guide for others along their journeys. Ask the people around you where they want to go and who they want to become, and then help them get there. They don’t need to be reminded of their past problems of failings. They need you to show them a path full of hope and love and help them see how far they’ve come every now and then.
The situation with the young boy and Kabi changed Bob’s world dramatically. He was now guardian of the boy and had taken him to hike Mount Kilimanjaro for his 10th birthday. It was a difficult trip, and the climb to the top was harsh and taxing. But Bob just kept following the path the guide led them up, and they eventually made it to the summit. The young boy didn’t quite make it to the top, but Bob pinned medals on him and told him how brave he was and how far he’d come.
In the bush, Bob also started meeting with the local witch doctors. Over time, he’s met with hundreds of them. He tells them what the consequences of their actions are now. If they continue to hurt children, they will go away for the rest of their lives. Then, when the scare tactic is over, he washes their feet. Bob hates feet, but he washes them for two reasons. First, you must commit to helping your enemies, not just tolerating them, if you want to truly love them. Second, becoming love means making big changes in your own life.
After performing the foot-washing ritual with these witch doctors, Bob asked them what they needed. They said they wanted to learn how to read and write. Shortly after, Bob started a school for the witch doctors. People who once hurt and killed children were now learning like children. Some people think he’s crazy for doing this, but he knows that you will often be thought crazy when you’re becoming love. The difference is that when you live with God, you no longer care about anything but finding those who need your help and love.
The progress the witch doctors have made in the school is nothing short of remarkable. They graduate with their certificates and see the world in a different way because of the love and education they’ve received. One night, Bob received a call in San Diego from two of his witch doctor-alumni about a new witch doctor in town who’d kidnapped a child. They knew where he was and wondered if they should do something. Four hours later, they called back to say they’d rescued the child and taken him back home. Before, they were the ones kidnapping children. Now, they saw the world through the lens of love because they’d seen God’s love with their own eyes. You never know how love is going to change people or yourself. You only find out after you commit to loving everybody always.
If you want to become love, you must let go of the person you’ve been up until now. What bothers you in the world? Who have you been avoiding? What have you been doing to play it safe with people? Stop all that now and reach out to someone you’re afraid of or don’t understand. Call them or send them a message, and give them love.
This process won’t be easy. You will be humbled. You will be uncomfortable. You will receive backlash or pushback from the people you’re trying to love and others in your life. Acknowledge the difficulties and keep moving forward. Believe in your guide and be not afraid. You will grow beyond your wildest imagination and you will get closer to God.
Practice your love daily. Stop being a spectator and become a player. When you stop stumbling as much, look around you to see how far you’ve come. Show others how far they’ve come. Then, look at yourself and marvel at who you’ve become. You won’t see your old self anymore. All you’ll see is love.
The guidance provided in Everybody, Always is meant to help you find your spiritual path with God and learn to love yourself and others without fear. This journey will not be easy, but if you want to become love, it will likely be worth it.
What is the most significant aspect of this book that has changed how you view yourself and others?
How has this book made you feel about the way you’ve been loving others up to now?
What changes will you make in your life to help you become love?
What advice would you give someone else who wants to strengthen their faith and relationship with God?
We all have people in our lives who make us angry or who we simply don’t like for one reason or another. It’s too easy to turn away from what we don’t like, so how can we start to turn toward people instead?
Think of someone who you’ve recently disagreed with or found frustrating or annoying. What are your thoughts concerning this person, and why do you feel this way?
Do you feel this person is worthy of your love? Why or why not?
What changes can you make to your perspective today to help you be able to give love to that person?
What might giving love to this person look like in your life?