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Love Does: Discover a Secretly Incredible Life in an Ordinary World

Book by Bob Goff · 11 quotes · People, Thinking, Used

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Love Does: Discover a Secretly Incredible Life in an Ordinary World Quotes

“I don't think anyone aims to be typical, really. Most people even vow to themselves some time in high school or college not to be typical. But still, they just kind of loop back to it somehow. Like the circular rails of a train at an amusement park, the scripts we know offer a brand of security, of predictability, of safety for us. But the problem is, they only take us where we've already been. They loop us back to places where everyone can easily go, not necessarily where we were made to go.”

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“The people I know, they are mostly aiming their crosshairs at stuff like being loved, not being lonely, finding some security, and a bunch of other things that are actually pretty normal and worth pursuing. In fact, I think God put it in our hearts to aim for those things, and it's nice when we actually hit those targets. Sometimes, though, things can go horribly wrong and we end up flat on our backs in a blood-soaked T-shirt. I don't think God is mad at us when that happens. He knew when He made the world that there was going to be some pain and people were going to get hurt--whether they did it to themselves or others did it to them. He knew people were going to manipulate each other and cheat and try to get love and respect in inappropriate ways. Still, it's hard for me to see Him enjoying the pain when we fail. These days, the view of God I hold on to isn't Him being mad because I've missed the mark. It's the one of Him seen through a bloody eye, scooping me into His arms, getting blood all over His shirt, and carrying me away to get healed.”

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“...much later I'd meet some Christians who used gun analogies about targets and missing the mark and all that. Or maybe it was about archery. Nevertheless, this analogy would be dragged out to tell us we were all blowing it and falling short. They also talked about how God was really mad at certain people because of what they believed or about the things they'd done. These Christians sounded a littld judgmental, to be honest. Looking back, though, these folks seemed dead-set on pulling the trigger more than anyone else I had met. They would find anybody who messed up or made a bad decision and get them in their sights.”

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“Jesus is basically saying, 'Look, none of the stuff you have is going to last, including you. You've only got about a dime's worth of life now. Come and trade up, come follow Me, and you can know God.' In that sense, Jesus isn't requesting a sacrifice at all. He's asking us to play Bigger and Better, where we give up ourselves and end up with Him.”

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“I think God sees our failed launches in the same way. He sees us flying over the handlebars in slow motion, and while He never wants to see us hurt, He knows it can happen from time to time when we live a life of total engagement. I think He sees the outcomes before they happen too and calls to us over the noise in our lives warning of something that won't go well. Like Adam, we often don't hear the warning call and race through the gears only to find ourselves upside down in the sand. After we come to, He dusts us off, helps us to our feet, and He hears us say, 'That was awesome.' More than once when I've crashed and burned, I've felt Him lean in closely to me after picking up the pieces of my life and whisper back to me, 'You know what? It was.”

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“Could God speak to me audibly if He wanted to? You bet, and I hope He does sometime; I'll let you know. Probably in a book called 'God Talked to Me'. Until then, it seems that what God does most the time when He has something to say is this...He doesn't pass us messages, instead He passes us each other.”

Page 144
Book:Love Does: Discover a Secretly Incredible Life in an Ordinary World
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“I've learned that God sometimes allows us to find ourselves in a place where we want something so bad that we can't see past it. Sometimes we can't even see God because of it. When we want something so bad, it's easy to mistake what we truly need for the thing we really want. When this sort of thing happens, and it seems to happen to everyone, I've found it's because what God has for us is obscured from view, just around another bend in the road. In the Bible, the people following God had the same problem I did. They swapped the real thing for an image of the real thing. We target the wrong thing and our misdirected life's goal ends up looking like a girl or a wide-brimmed hat or a golden calf. All along, what God really wants for us is something much different, something more tailored for us. [...] And when each of us looks back at all the turns and folds God has allowed in our lives, I don't think it looks like a series of folded-overs that have shaped our lives. Instead I think we'll conclude in the end that maybe we're all a little like human origami and the more creases we have, the better.”

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