53 pages • 1 hour read
Everybody, Always: Becoming Love in a World Full of Setbacks and Difficult People
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Chapters 5-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary: “Limo Driver”
After four chapters dealing with reaching out to others in Christian love, Goff shifts his focus in Chapters 5-9 toward individual spiritual growth. The theme of Chapter 5 is a comparison of the Christian life to either a castle or a kingdom. Goff argues that a castle may be grand, but it is limited and walled off from the outside world. A kingdom, he says, is intentionally open to the world. To be a friend of Jesus, Goff asserts, one must build a kingdom rather than a castle (41-42). Goff argues that God sees all people as sons or daughters created in His image. He says turning our lives into kingdoms opens the door for unlovable people to approach us. This is God’s intention for us. He writes: “God wants me to love the ones I don’t understand, to get to know their names” (43).
As a backdrop for this topic, Goff relates being invited to Disney World in Orlando, Florida, to address a group of Christian radio broadcasters. His interactions with the limousine driver who picked him up at the airport become the template for his discussion of accepting others and getting to know them. He concludes the Chapter with a lengthy description of interacting with the driver, talking him into letting Goff drive the limousine, and pinning him with a nebulous medal as a reward for being “brave, courageous, and foolhardy (45-48).
When discussing the importance of accepting others, Goff references the cleansing of the Gerasene demoniac as found in Chapter 5 of the Gospel of Mark. He contrasts the experience of the possessed man with the experience of the farmer whose pigs perished after Jesus cast the demons into them (42-43).
Goff then shifts to a discussion of welcoming important guests to his family’s lodge in Canada. Each guest is asked to write a permanent message on the bottom of the supper table. One visitor simply wrote the word “with,” which Goff perceives to be tremendously important. He argues that this is the entire message of the Bible, that God is with us (44-45).
Chapter 6 Summary: “Skydiving”
Goff begins this chapter with a two-page description of his son Adam taking up solo skydiving and ties this to Jesus, writing, “Jesus did something a lot like what I did with Adam. He jumped out of heaven to be with us” (53). He expresses that this means God wants to be a participant in our lives, and he focuses on the notion of Jesus being referred to as Immanuel, “God with us” (51). In response, Goff secretly took skydiving lessons. He records the exhilaration of his first jump and compares Christian living to skydiving.
Relaying his actions to the proverb with which he began the chapter—“God was with us so we’d be with each other” (49)—Goff expresses a desire to follow Jesus but says he doesn’t have the confidence to say he will believe in Jesus throughout his life. Rather, he says he will try to obey Jesus in 30-second increments (54). He goes on to give an example of how he tries to love difficult people this way. Goff asserts it’s easy to agree with Jesus but difficult to obey. He says we make loving people more complicated than Jesus did (57).
Chapter 7 Summary: “A Day at the Museum”
This chapter is a sermon about living an authentic Christian life as opposed to simply posturing. Goff illustrates this idea by describing a trip he took with his family to Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum. He says he pretended to be a wax figure and fooled two elderly women (60). Goff asserts from time to time we are all posers when it comes to our Christian faith. As we become love, he argues, we stop posing and become the real thing (61).
For scriptural support, he invokes the story of Ananias and Sapphira from the Book of Acts 5:1-11, an account of two early Christians who falsely claimed they had donated all the proceeds for a piece of property to the church, then fell down dead when confronted with their deceit. In response to the question of why they died, Goff suggests that God was unhappy with them because they were posers. Goff does not say, importantly, that God killed them (64). He writes, “People who are becoming love keep it real about who they are right now, while living in constant anticipation about who God’s helping them become” (65). He repeatedly says throughout the chapter that we get ahead of ourselves and believe we are more spiritually advanced than we really are. Comparing human life to a video/audio production, Goff says we should get synced up with where we are supposed to be (65).
Chapter 8 Summary: “The Pizza Place”
Goff recounts how he traded in a great number of Skee-Ball tickets only to receive a worthless prize. He compares this experience to typical Christian living, saying those who are becoming love have stopped collecting coupons. After expressing that those who are becoming love are altruistic in their universal love, he argues they serve without thought of reward because they know it pleases God (71). Ticket-counting Christians, he asserts, are seeking validation. He argues this is because they are confused, not realizing the degree to which God loves us. Goff writes, “He wants our hearts, not our help” (72). Instead of talking about what we’re doing for Jesus, we should be talking about “what God is doing” (74). He encourages readers to say repeatedly, “It’s not about me” (74). Goff closes the Chapter by saying he has a very good memory that gets in the way of his “becoming love” because people who are becoming love don’t keep track of things anymore (75).
Chapter 9 Summary: “From the Lighthouse Window”
Goff opens Chapter 9 with the extended illustration of a piano recital he performed when he was in elementary school after six months of practicing with a teacher he disliked. Goff’s performance was an epic fail. He left the stage weeping and quit playing the piano (77-79). A decade later as a college student, with no practice or sheet music, he perfectly played the recital piece, “From the Lighthouse Window.” He attributed his perfect version of the song to there being no audience and no expectations. He compares “faith communities” to music recitals, saying “People who are becoming love don’t need any of it” (80).
Goff continues by describing his “living room” project as an attempt to do what early Christians did in the book of Acts: “His [Jesus’s] friends invited everyone to their living rooms too. They broke bread together and had things in common. That’s what we were aiming for” (81). In Acts, these groups are referred to as “the church.” His “living room” experiment began so well that he and his colleagues had to rent the House of Blues next to Disneyland for the second meeting. Goff describes a third session in which they rented a convention center, took up a huge offering, left it out for anyone who needed some money, and then gave the remaining proceeds to “people who were poor and hurting and needed some help” (82). Goff concludes the chapter by instructing readers to hug their well-intentioned friends who make mistakes (84).
Chapters 5-9 Analysis
Many of Goff’s chapters cover several different subjects and stories, shifting between them in which may feel like a disjointed way. Chapter 5 is the epitome of chapters like these. The author changes the subject from an invitation to speak at Disney World, to the proper way to pray, to an impassive limousine driver, to the architectural plans to the castle at Disneyland—all within the first two-and-half pages. The quickly shifting scenes and topics continue throughout Chapter 5, seeming to foreshadow Goff’s declaration: “God knows we’re easily confused and often wayward […]” (43). The actual theme of the chapter, creating a life that is open and welcoming like a kingdom rather than a life that is insular and forbidding like a castle, eventually emerges.
To demonstrate the importance of openness to others, Goff describes the biblical healing of the Gerasene demoniac. Those acquainted with the story will quickly recognize it appears in all three of the synoptic Gospels with significant differences in its telling. Goff is using the version from the Gospel of Mark 5:1-20. After relating the healing story, Goff says a good day for the possessed man was a bad day for the pig farmer and an even worse one for the herd of swine (42). Swine, it must be mentioned, were inherently unclean to first-century Palestinian Jews. Thus, indirectly causing a herd of pigs to drown would have been considered even a greater miracle than healing a demoniac to Mark’s readers, who would have perceived the financial losses of the farmer to be a form of divine justice. If Goff’s point is that the demoniac went from being a castle person to being a kingdom person—one characterized by humility rather than pride—it should be noted that neither he nor Jesus was welcome in Gerasene after this display of enormous power. It could be said the demoniac became an open and expansive person, but he had to travel away from his home through the Decapolis to tell people about Jesus.
Goff uses three different subjects to express the notion that Christians are leaving their mark on the world by which they will be remembered. He cautions followers of Jesus that a worldly person will judge all followers of Jesus based upon their experience with a single follower (46). He closes the chapter with the retelling of one of his idiosyncratic practices: the arbitrary awarding of medals to strangers. Goff reportedly carries with him many blank medals and will, as the mood strikes, pin a medal on someone’s chest with pomp and a speech proclaiming why the medal is deserved. Goff does not record anyone ever refusing one of his medals. At the end of the chapter, he awards a medal to the limousine driver who broke the company rules and allowed Goff to drive the vehicle to Disney World (47).
In heart of his discussion in Chapter 6, Goff talks about Christians who claim they will be perpetually obedient to Jesus. Goff views this as ambitious folly. Instead, he claims he will strive to be obedient to Jesus for 30 seconds at a time. In particular, he is referring to the act of loving unlovable individuals. He says he does a literal countdown of 30 seconds, renewing his 30-second commitment when the countdown is over (54). The extreme difficulty he expresses in loving unlovable people reveals his underlying assumption that loving others necessitates feeling affection for them and that Jesus universally felt affection for those to whom he ministered. Goff, however, does not address the possibility that one can act in compassionate, accepting, generous love toward those who are beyond one’s affection.
In Chapter 7, Goff chooses the story of Ananias and Sapphira from the Christian Bible to support his point that self-honesty is essential for personal faith development. This story stands in stark contrast to the tone and theology of the Book of Acts in several ways that make it problematic as an example here: It is the only incident of Christians perishing in the company of other believers; it delivers judgment rather than the abundant mercy of the early Church; it portrays Peter, the chief Apostle, as someone who sets a trap for a fellow Christian and hands out condemnation; and most of all, the passage can be read as God taking the lives of believers. Though Goff does not expressly endorse the idea that God killed Ananias and Sapphira, he does not disavow it and goes so far as to express God’s disapproval of these two. The implication that God may consider one fudging on one’s church pledge to be a capital offense may be as likely to drive people away as toward God.
In Chapter 8, Goff warns his readers against bragging about their exploits on behalf of Jesus. He says that followers of Jesus should speak more about Jesus than about themselves, even if their actions are on behalf of Jesus (74). However, there is an irony to the timing of his message, as Goff writes this having spent much of the book recounting what he has done on behalf of Jesus to serve others. Throughout the remainder of the book, Goff continually describes his noteworthy work and achievements, from spontaneous outreach to the homeless, to establishing international sanctuaries for children. Each of these works is worthy and the sum of them is a great accomplishment. However, if seeking acclaim for doing good deeds in Jesus’s name is a sign that one’s relationship with Jesus is dysfunctional (74), then some readers may find Goff’s book calls his own spirituality into question.
Chapter 9 features Goff’s criticism of the structured, traditional church in favor of the sort of spontaneous gatherings he hosted in his “living room” project. From those three events, he observes that people who are becoming love pick up “actions worth repeating” and thus “fill their lives with songs, practices, and habits that communicate love, acceptance, grace, generosity, whimsy, and forgiveness” (82). Goff likens his living room events to the communal gatherings described in the Book of Acts 2:43-47. Some elements of Goff’s comments should be analyzed. First, throughout the history of Christianity, there has been a tendency to romanticize and idolize the “New Testament Church,” and there have been many efforts to “restore” the earliest church. Early church historians are quick to point out the first-century church was full of conflict, factionalism, church splits, and theological discord. Of the 27 books making up the Christian Bible, 21 are epistles written to churches and individuals concerning church problems.
Second, Goff’s oversimplification of the early Christian experience is also a characteristic of those beginning new denominations. Like Goff, those founding new Christian movements tend to assert they have the right and ultimate understanding of Jesus’s message and are fulfilling the true purpose of his ministry. One might point out that, unlike other schismatic leaders, Goff does not propose any new or refined theological insight leading to righteousness; indeed Goff eschews all overriding theological principles in favor of seeking the presence of God and following the example of Jesus. Of course, that is precisely a new theological imperative.
Third, Goff viewed the living room events as wildly successful, just as the initial gatherings of the early church resulted in explosive growth. However, apart from a meaningful spiritual experience for those in attendance, the question remains of what lasting significance was accomplished. The traditional, ritual-bound, “music recital” type of churches Goff criticizes are, for all their shortcomings, enduring sites of mutual support, mission, and proclamation.
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