Review: Everybody Always by Bob Goff

Everybody, Always: Becoming Love in a World Full of Setbacks and Difficult People by Bob Goff
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

[Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this book from Bookish First for review purposes.]

I've read through some reviews of Bob Goff's first book, Love Does: Discover a Secretly Incredible Life in an Ordinary World, but since I haven't actually read that book I semi-dismissed them. There was some commentary that I remember about how Love Does is pretty much a "Look at me and what I did" bragfest. After reading Everybody, Always, yes I can see that he does do the humblebrag a lot. It's not quite humble, though, since even though he's always bringing it back to Jesus, it's still a "look what I did" kind of thing (and holy crow is this guy rich and he lets us know it). I get what he's doing with it - Jesus works with us and through us and yes we can all do amazing things just by loving others. But I can see where people are coming from when they say it feels like he just spends a couple hundred pages bragging about his accomplishments.

That aside, I really did enjoy this book. It gets repetitive - love everyone, love your enemies, love the difficult people, etc. Jesus loves us, we should love everyone, yadda yadda. But I think that the repetitiveness reinforces how it's something we all need to practice. And practice. And practice. Because we're never going to be perfect, but at least we can practice.

This guy sounds like he has an amazing life. Yeah, I'm a bit envious of all the traveling he's done, everything he's done for others, and even how much he's managed to grow throughout. I rolled my eyes a few times at the mention of buying houses, motorcycles, and planes on a whim. But he interjects so much humor at such random moments that it made up for it. And underneath the wealth, I could see a man who is far from perfect, but wants to be like Jesus, and wants everyone else to be like Him too.

If you can get past the "Look at me" feeling of the book, this is highly recommended for anyone struggling with how to love others, especially those you don't want to love. The last few chapters were a story in themselves, which I found remarkable. I am hoping to pass this book along to the people I love and hope they can get something good out of it as well.

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