Last Thursday, I was invited with a group of Invisible Children interns and Roadies to meet a local author for donuts. I had not heard of the author, but I knew exactly how I felt about donuts so I said yes (a thousand times yes). We showed up at a nondescript office building in San Diego and about 20 of us interns file through a door and into the arms of someone I can only describe as Santa Claus minus the red suit, long beard, and jelly belly. I’m not kidding: this man bear-hugged each of us as we entered his office, warmly welcoming us and offering us donuts (which, I must note with gusto, were full of jelly).
And this was our introduction to Bob Goff: author of the New York Times best-selling novel Love Does; attorney; professor; founder of the nonprofit, Restore International; Honorary Consul for the Republic of Uganda to the United States; and winner of the Most-Enthusiastic-Man-You-Will-Ever-Meet Award (as bestowed by yours truly). We all sat down around him like kids at story time and proceeded to have our minds blown by his stories of what it looks like in our world to love people “extravagantly and inefficiently”.
Bob’s book, Love Does, is a collection of anecdotes about living an extraordinary life, but the amazing thing about Bob is that he is a man that so obviously practices what he preaches. He told us about his work in Uganda stopping the appalling ritual of child sacrifice by witch-doctors: how these village witch-doctors abduct children and kill them for religious sacrifice for a high enough price. As an attorney, Bob has met with these witch-doctors in an effort to stop their violent crimes – and after each tense and dangerous meeting, Bob asks if he can wash their feet as an authentic gesture of loving his enemy (an action made even more profound by the fact that Bob admittedly has an aversion to feet, particularly of the gnarly witch-doctor variety). He never lets a phone call go to voicemail because he wants to be always available to the world (yes, the world – he put his personal phone number in the back of his bestselling book, and curious fans are shocked when he actually answers). When speaking about his wife, he refers to her only as Sweet Maria. And he invites a group of interns to his office simply to chat about what it means to live life “palms up.”
See? I told you he was enthusiastic.
Needless to say, I got my hands on a copy of Love Does the minute our meet-and-greet was over and – also needless to say – the stories he shares in writing are just as impassioned and inspiring as the ones he told in person. Bob’s tenacious and infectious adherence to the principle of love simultaneously simplifies and expands everything, illustrating over and over that the only thing that matters in life is human connection born out of kindness. We told him as we left that we’d like to have him over to the intern house for pizza next time. It’ll be our treat, truly.
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