Everybody Always: Becoming Love in a World Full of Setbacks and Difficult People
By: Bob Goff
CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform (May 2, 2018)
290 pages
Everybody Always is a fantastic follow-up to Goff’s first book, Love Does. While the latter focused on making love an action, rather than an idea – the former is intent on the theme of actually becoming love. In the way that Donald Miller and Anne Lamott do, Goff weaves together themes of love with Bible stories and personal anecdotes. Most touching to me was the story of Carol and her battle with cancer. How meaningful that friends were there to love her through each step. We all need to be loving each other, through every step of life.
Two of my favorite quotes:
Because I’m a diplomat for the Republic of Uganda, the last thing we did when we moved in across the street was to raise the Ugandan flag over our new home. Not many people know this, but where the consul lives and the flag of Uganda flies, it’s actually Ugandan soil. It’s hard to believe, but our house is the diplomatic mission of a foreign country to the United States. I suppose if you mess up big enough in your life, you could come over and seek asylum at my house. When things happen at our home now, we don’t call the police. We call the Feds, and agents come within minutes. I’ve only called once, but it’s pretty cool.
All of this raised a question I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. How do we prove who we are? I don’t mean who our driver’s licenses say we are or what our careers suggest about who we are or who we tell other people we are or who they tell us we are. Jesus talked to His friends a lot about how we should identify ourselves. He said it wouldn’t be what we said we believed or all the good we hoped to do someday. Nope, He said we would identify ourselves simply by how we loved people. It’s tempting to think there is more to it, but there’s not. Love isn’t something we fall into; love is someone we become.
