FOREWORD

by Donald Miller

Bob Goff has had a greater impact on my life than any person I’ve known. And while you’ll read stories in this book about adventures both big and small, it isn’t bears or witchdoctors or dynamite that got through to me, though I confess Bob’s adventures are intoxicating. The reason Bob has impacted my life is because he loves me.

Bob Goff loves people with a force that is natural, and by natural I mean like nature, like a waterfall or wind or waves on the ocean. He loves effortlessly, as though love packs annually in snow on a mountain, melting and rushing through him in an infinite loop. There’s no explanation for a man who can love this well save God. I think Bob Goff knows God, and I think God’s love flows through him.

I’m not alone in these sentiments. There are many around the world who have experienced the same love. What do you do with a man who will get on a plane and fly around the world to attend the wedding of a new acquaintance? What do you do with a man who offices at Tom Sawyer Island at Disneyland because angry lawyers are less likely to yell at him there, and for that matter, what do you do with a lawyer whose business card simply reads Helper? What do you do with a man who worked for two years to free a child from a prison in Uganda, all because I met the kid and asked him to? How do you explain the fact that he lumbers, pajama-clad, into his garden every morning to find a rose for his sleeping wife? And then there’s the old lady who ran into his jeep, sending his body flying into the street to whom he also sent flowers. There’re the DC diplomats, the new acquaintances to whom he daily sent pizza for a week, the Ugandan judiciary that he took to Disneyland, and the refugee camp outside Gulu where he dug wells and delivered pounds and pounds of clothes.

I don’t know how to explain Bob’s love except to say it is utterly and delightfully devastating. You simply cannot live the same once you know him. He will wreck your American dream and help you find your actual dream. He will wreck your crappy marriage and help you find a love story. To know Bob is to have a façade you’ve spent your life maintaining beautifully strewn to ruins while, like a friend, he comes alongside you as you rebuild.

Bob has offered to get on a plane on my day of trouble, called exactly when I needed him to, spoke a word of truth when I was being bombarded with lies, given me a family, given me a home, given me a vision for what can happen in a person’s life when they are devoted to giving it away.

This book will be troubling for some. We don’t like to put hands and feet on love. When love is a theory, it’s safe, it’s free of risk. But love in the brain changes nothing. Bob believes that love is too beautiful a concept to keep locked up behind a forehead like a prisoner.

Those I’ve introduced Bob to, and there have been many, find it hard to put into words what is different about him. But the title of this book says it all. Where you and I may want love and feel love and say love, Bob reminds us that love does things. It writes a letter and gets on a plane. It orders pizza and jumps in a lake. It hugs and prays and cries and sings. Much of what we’ve come to know and believe about love doesn’t ring true once you know this man whose love does.

What a privilege to introduce you to my friend Bob Goff.

Sincerely,
Donald Miller