Just Continue That Thought...

A thought by Bob Goff from his book, Everybody, Always: Becoming Love in a World Full of Setbacks and Difficult People ( p. 47). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition. (Click on the book title to go to Amazon.com to buy the book.)   Ok, so what is it? Bob says, “We’re supposed to just love the people in front of us. We’re the ones who tell them who they are. We don’t need to spend as much time as we do telling people what we think about what they’re doing. Loving people doesn’t mean we need to control their conduct. There’s a big difference between the two. Loving people means caring without an agenda. As soon as we have an agenda, it’s not love anymore. It’s acting like you care to get someone to do what you want or what you think God wants them to do. Do less of that, and people will see a lot less of you and more of Jesus. “Talk behind each other’s backs constantly. Just talk about the right stuff. Talk about Jesus. Talk about grace. Talk about love and acceptance. People do

A thought by Bob Goff from his book, Everybody, Always: Becoming Love in a World Full of Setbacks and Difficult People ( p. 43). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition. (Click on the book title to go to Amazon.com to buy the book.)   I love Disneyland and I love my Mickey watch.   Bob says, “The windows in the second-story shops are dedicated to people who helped build the kingdom there. At Disneyland in Southern California, I found a window across from the Jungle Cruise for a guy named Harper Goff. He’s not related to me at all, but that’s not what I tell the people who sell tickets to get in. The window says, ‘Prof. Harper Goff—Banjo Lessons.’ But banjo isn’t what he’ll be remembered for. You see, Harper Goff has a window at Disneyland because he helped build a kingdom there.” Bob goes on, “Here’s the question I keep asking myself: What do I want my window to say? This question is worth thinking about even if you don’t know the answer. What part are you going to play in build

A thought by Bob Goff from his book, Everybody, Always: Becoming Love in a World Full of Setbacks and Difficult People ( p. 41). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition. (Click on the book title to go to Amazon.com to buy the book.)   Have you ever built a sand castle or maybe a Lego castle?   Have you? Bob says, “We actually build castles all the time, out of our jobs and our families and the things we’ve purchased. Sometimes we even make them out of each other. Some of these castles are impressive too. Lots of people come to admire what we’ve built over the course of our lives and tell us what great castles we have. But Jesus told His friends we weren’t supposed to spend our lives building castles. He said He wanted us to build a kingdom, and there’s a big difference between building a castle and building a kingdom.” Bob goes on, “You see, castles have moats to keep creepy people out, but kingdoms have bridges to let everyone in. Castles have dungeons for people who have messed

A thought by Bob Goff from his book, Everybody, Always: Becoming Love in a World Full of Setbacks and Difficult People ( p. 31). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition. (Click on the book title to go to Amazon.com to buy the book.)   Are you someone who seems to be compelled to tell people how to do what they want to do?   You say they need to comply with doing this particular way.   You know what is best.   But they don’t seem to do it. Well, Bob says, “The problem with mere compliance is it turns us into actors. Rather than making decisions ourselves, we read the lines off the script someone we were told to respect handed to us, and we sacrifice our ability to decide for ourselves. “The fix for all this is as easy as the problem is hard. Instead of telling people what they want, we need to tell them who they are. This works every time. We’ll become in our lives whoever the people we love the most say we are.” He goes on, “God did this constantly in the Bible. He told Moses