53 pages • 1 hour read
Everybody, Always: Becoming Love in a World Full of Setbacks and Difficult People
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Themes
Becoming Love
Goff frequently reiterates that Jesus is calling human beings to become love. He uses the phrase “becoming love” to describe those people whom he perceives to embody compassionate love toward others. He includes individuals such as the former refugee Walter who greets new refugee immigrants at the airport with open arms and meaningful assistance, the reconstructive surgeon Randy who sought out Goff and volunteered to treat a mutilated Ugandan child without cost, and the blind para-athlete Lex, whom Goff perceives as embodying the fearless love Jesus wants everyone to attain.
What Goff means by becoming love is never clearly spelled out by the author. Goff’s intent is for readers to deduce the meaning of this phrase from the many anecdotes he uses. Often, he relates a story about certain individuals and makes pronouncements like, “I saw a guy who was becoming love” (206). There are several common qualities and behaviors he describes in those he says are becoming love. Chief among these are those whose lives are irrevocably changed, such as the two witch doctors—who previously engaged in child sacrifice—who called him from Uganda to report the kidnapping of a child for a sacrificial killing, then texted him later saying they had rescued the child (217-18). Another quality Goff describes as love is unqualified acceptance, as demonstrated by the TSA agent Adrian who greeted air travelers with serene gentleness regardless of their dispositions (106-07). Goff also values spontaneous affection as true Christian love. Everybody, Always is full of examples of Goff himself engaging in impromptu actions he perceives as expressions of love, such as bringing many helium balloons when he went to an airport with Walter to greet refugees or spontaneously pinning a medal on the chest of a limousine driver who allowed Goff to change places with him to drive to his destination.
For Goff himself, the acid test of becoming love is the ability to love unlovable, unworthy people such as those he has named as his enemies or “people who creep us out” (3). He frequently states that loving unlovable people is extremely difficult for him. To overcome this difficulty, he often says, he must obey and imitate Jesus. His difficulty in loving unlovable individuals reveals his perception that one must feel affection toward the recipient before benevolence counts as real Christian love.
Purpose, Not Plan
For Goff, living a life of spontaneous love is the only significant plan Christians need to make. He repeatedly criticizes those who spend time planning out their Christian lives. He goes so far as to point out that making mission plans and waiting for divine instructions are means of avoiding acting upon one’s faith (145). Watching for opportunities to engage in accepting or providing love, he continually says, is something Christians can engage in immediately without waiting for God’s input or approval. He expresses the belief that Christians already have all the resources and permissions they need to be divine servants. Indeed, he believes that failing to immediately, actively engage in spontaneous acts of love is procrastination. He writes, “Figure out what your next move is going to be, then make it” (91).
More important than planning to serve God, Goff says, is living with a purpose. The purpose he espouses is using Jesus as an example for learning how to embody his divine love. Striving to be the best person we can be, he argues, is inadequate because it means we are still focused on ourselves. He alludes to Matthew 5:48, “You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Revised Standard Version), then states, “Our problem following Jesus is we’re trying to be a better version of us, rather than a more accurate reflection of Him” (193). The implication is that the perfection Jesus commands comes not from trying to live a righteous, worshipful life but rather striving to imitate Jesus in every situation.
Goff embodies the imperative of acting spontaneously rather than carefully thinking through his actions. Everybody, Always records many of these instances. Goff describes traveling to Uganda in 2001 while that nation was still engaged in a civil war. Without announcement or any well-defined intention, he talks his way into the chambers of the Chief Justice of the Ugandan Supreme Court. After a candid conversation about the issues the war-torn country was facing—particularly the plight of children—Goff gets ready to leave and impulsively goes behind the justice’s desk to hug him. When the justice points out that this was a serious breach of protocol, Goff responds by removing his front door key from his key ring and presenting it to the Chief Justice (177-79). Eventually, the justice came to the United States and visited Goff’s home. Standing on Goff’s front doorstep, the justice tried the door key, discovering that it did work (183). In discussing his bodacious self-introduction to the Chief Justice, Goff writes: “Sometimes we wait for permission or a plan or a calling or a mystical sign from God […]. What I’ve found, though, is when we’re looking for a plan, God often sends us a person” (179)
An Informal Approach to God, Jesus, Christians, and the Bible
While Goff may not write it down, he has chosen to treat God, Jesus, the Bible, and Christians with informality. He refers to God only as “God” and not Creator, Holy One, Most High, Supreme Being, or any other expression of divine royalty. Neither does he refer to Jesus as Christ, Son of God, Savior, or even simply Lord; he calls him only “Jesus,” apart from the one occasion he calls Jesus “the carpenter from Nazareth” (121). It seems apparent that Christians are referred to as “friends of Jesus,” although for Goff those two groups are not synonymous. Goff reveals his belief in universal salvation at several points and, in his discussion of belonging to a church, he implies broadly that all people belong to “our church” (173). From that perspective, Goff means that people who imitate Jesus intentionally or unintentionally as they practice accepting, providing love are the friends of Jesus to whom he refers. If so, “friends of Jesus” for Goff applies to some but not all Christians, as well as to some who are not part of Christianity in any formal way but practice love as Jesus did.
Goff does not speak casually of God, Jesus, and others out of disrespect. Whenever he refers to God or Jesus with a pronoun—He, Him, His—Goff invariably capitalizes it to show deference. It’s obvious as well that Goff perceives God as the Creator and Jesus as on par with God, remarking for instance that Jesus “invented eyes.” His informal references to God and Jesus are, in part, Goff’s attempt to reduce the royal distance between humanity and the divine. This is a rightful concern since most Christian theologians would acknowledge the common belief that Jesus came to demonstrate God’s accessibility to and intimacy with human beings. Goff frequently expresses his belief that Christian rituals, denominations, and theological discourse have created distance between God and humanity. He seeks to eliminate that distance through the colloquial manner in which he refers to Jesus and God.
This desire to informalize Christian faith extends to his treatment of biblical scripture. Though Goff makes scriptural references often, he seldom quotes the chapter and verse of the scripture to which he refers. He is also imprecise in using biblical references and almost never comments upon the historical or cultural context from which a Bible passage emerged. One example is his discussion of Jesus’s healing of the Gerasene demoniac, which appears in all three of the synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke (42). A reader must go to each of those three scriptural passages to determine that Goff is specifically referring to the Marcan version. Goff lingers on the plight of the pig farmer when the legion of demons who possessed the demoniac went into a herd of swine that rushed into the Sea of Galilee and drowned. Rudimentary Marcan scholarship would hold this was a double miracle, since Galilean Jews considered pigs ceremonially unclean. Common Jewish citizens, Mark’s target audience, would have considered this a divine cleansing of the land.
Goff’s constant scriptural references are an indication that he assigns great authority to the Bible. Therefore, the reasons for his informality may be twofold. Perhaps he is not that well acquainted with the intricacies of the Bible and the cultural settings from which it emerged. However, his informality may also be a reaction to the idea that, as he indicates several times in the book, some Christians abuse the Bible by using it as a rule book to add spiritual distance between God and humanity, thereby putting religious leaders in positions of power over other Christians through their misuse of the Bible as immutable divine law. Most likely, both scenarios about Goff’s use of the scriptures are at play here.
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