Living a life fully engaged and full of whimsy and the kind of things that love does is something most people plan to do, but along the way they just kind of forget, according to Bob Goff in his book Love Does: Discover a Secretly Incredible Life in an Ordinary World. God chooses ordinary people like us to make a difference by getting to the “do” part of faith. Love doesn’t just keep thinking about it or planning for it. Love does.
The book describes the extraordinary whimsical adventures that the author has lived, all as a result of saying “yes” to opportunities. After failing to get into law school, he camped every day outside the dean’s office until the dean let him in. When saying “yes” to what he thought was a friend’s prank, he found himself appointed as honorary consul for Uganda. After 9/11 he encouraged his children to write to world leaders, and they were invited to go and visit several of them. He joined some friends in a small boat for the Transpac Race from Los Angeles to Hawaii. In Uganda, he arranged for hundreds of young prisoners who were being held without trial to have their cases heard and be freed.
The book is full of funny and entertaining stories, but more than that, it issues a challenge to the reader: Every morning when you wake up you get the invitation to live a life of complete engagement, a life where love does. It is an invitation to participate fully in this amazing life for one more day, and yet it is an invitation which most people turn down. How are you going to respond?
I have read a lot of great Christian books which contain interesting stories and good advice on ways of following Jesus more closely, but I cannot remember any that grabbed my imagination and presented a fresh and original challenge as forcefully as this one. This is simply an outstanding book, and I highly recommend it, particularly for young adults. (An electronic copy was provided to me by BookSneeze for review purposes.)