Love Does: Discover a Secretly Incredible Life in an Ordinary World is written in stories; it takes our life experiences and attributes to them how God uses them in our lives. If you think about it our faith and our Christianity is active, we learn and grow through experiencing God working in our lives. 

Bob Goff uses his experiences to reflect on what his experiences have taught him about God. This book is a testament to the fact that studying God and his word is not the same as enacting God’s commands and seeking God in experiences. And as college students, we are just getting around to writing our story. We don’t know what we want to do with our lives and we are searching for our next step. 

Goff gives some awesome advice in his epilogue, he tells us to in our next step “pick something you aren’t just able to do; pick something you feel like you were made to do and then do lots of that.” College is a time to learn about ourselves and grow in our relationships with Christ, and we do this by seeing God working in our experiences. Goff’s genius is something that I can’t describe with words, his perceptiveness on life has taught me so much about how to view my experiences and how to grow in my relationship with God. 

I am going to quit writing and just show you the genius I’m talking about; here are some of my favorite lines from his book…

• “I learned that fully loving and fully living are not only synonymous but the kind of life that Jesus invited us to be a part of.” (page 16)
• “…I’ve realized that I used to be afraid of failing at the things that really mattered to me, but now I’m more afraid of succeeding at things that don’t matter.” (page 30)
• “That’s what love does - it pursues blindly, unflinchingly, and without end.” (page 52)
• “God is always trying to save lives, and it seems like he usually uses the least likely people to do it.” (page 66)
• “Friends do - they don’t just think about it.” (page 74)
• “Accepting the invitation to show up in life is about moving from the bleachers to the field. It’s moving from developing opinions to developing options. It’s about having things that matter to us enough that we stop just thinking about those things and actually do something about them.” (page 82)
• “He want us to bring all of the faith we have to Him, even if its just a dime’s worth, and he promises that He will trade up with us- because He Himself is what we have the chance to trade for.” (page 93)
• “None of us wan to make God look bad. But in the end, being fake makes God look worse.” (page 98)
• “ I think God doesn’t spell out everything for us in life, but he does tell us how we can write our lives better; and trusting him implicitly is always the right place to start.” (page 102)
• “Jesus was always talking about a reverse economy. He talked about how if you want to receive, you give. If you want to lead, you follow. That the poor are rich and you only really live for certain things if you are willing to die for them.” (page 112)
• “…this is to say that we have a lot more power to decide who we do life with than some people think.” (page 118)
• “It taught me that when God is big enough and loves me enough to say He forgives me, I should actually believe Him.” (page 124)
• “I’ve met people life that, people who leak Jesus. Whenever you’re around them, Jesus keeps coming up with words and with actions. I don’t suppose everybody gets kit by Jesus, but those of us who have talk about Him differently.” (page 125)
• “The kind of adventure Jesus has invited us on doesn’t require an application or prerequisites. Its just about deciding to take up the offer made by a father who wants us to come.” (page 136)
• “God loves the humble ones, and the humble ones often don’t make it as first-round draft picks for jobs with big titles or positions. But they always seem to be the first-round picks for God when He’s looking for someone to use in a big way.” (page 163)
• “…God is good, all the time. God is good.” (page 172)
• “What I like about Jesus’ message is that we don’t need to study Him anymore to know Him.” (page 202)
• “Because I know Jesus, where I once thought of things in one way, now I think of them in another way.” (page 205)
• “…love does whatever it take to multiply itself and somehow along the way everyone becomes a part of it. You know why? Because that is what love does.” (page 215)

Now you see what I mean? Bob Goff = insightful genius.