Love Does

The title does a lot of quiet work. In English we treat love almost entirely as a noun — a thing we have, hold, fall into, lose. Goff wants to yank it into the verb column and leave it there. His claim, threaded through every chapter, is that the version of love we actually admire in other people is never the feeling; it is what the feeling made them do. We remember the friend who drove four hours, not the friend who felt terrible for us from across the country. The doing is the evidence, and Goff suspects it might also be the substance.

This has teeth when he applies it to faith, which is where the book ultimately lives. Goff is a Christian, and he is frankly impatient with a religion that has become mostly about correct opinions. He notices how much energy people spend agreeing with things, studying things, having the right positions on things — and how little of it ever leaves the head and travels to the hands. A belief you never act on, he suggests, is functionally identical to a belief you don't hold. It just feels more virtuous.

The word Goff returns to again and again is whimsy, which sounds like an excuse for flakiness and turns out to be nearly the opposite. By whimsy he means a settled willingness to follow the good and slightly ridiculous idea instead of the sensible one — to say yes to the ice cream and the ocean and the stranger's phone call, on the theory that a life arranged entirely around caution is a life that never actually loves anyone out loud. The Pacific crossing, the world tour, the open invitation to call him: these are whimsy operationalized.

What keeps it from being mere impulsiveness is that Goff treats it as a practice, something you build a life around rather than indulge on a good day. He organizes his time to be interruptible. He answers the phone. He deliberately leaves margin so that when the improbable chance to show up for someone arrives, he is not too scheduled, too tired, or too dignified to take it. The spontaneity is real, but the readiness for it is engineered. He has, in effect, made room in advance for love to do something.

Step back from the individual stories and Love Does is making a single, fairly uncompromising argument about the whole architecture of belief. Goff is claiming that a conviction which never changes your behavior is not really a conviction — it is a preference, dressed in more serious language. This cuts against a lot of how we're taught to think. We tend to grade ourselves on the sincerity and correctness of what we believe, as if the internal state were the finished product. Goff grades on delivery. To him the belief is not complete until it has moved your body somewhere it wouldn't otherwise have gone.

That is a demanding standard, and it explains why the book is gentler than it sounds. Goff knows the gap between intention and action is where most of us actually live, and he is not interested in shaming anyone across it. His method is invitation, not indictment. He tells you about the bench and the ocean and the ice cream not to prove he is better, but because a story about someone who did the thing is far more likely to get you to do the thing than a lecture about why you should. He is, in the end, trying to make faith less about being right and more about being present.

The man on the bench outside the Dean's office did eventually get up and walk into that building, and he has been getting up and walking into rooms ever since — courtrooms, classrooms in Uganda, the offices of world leaders, the lives of strangers who called a number in the back of a book and were startled to find him on the other end. The stories in Love Does are not connected by a common outcome. They are connected by a common refusal: Goff will not let an impulse toward someone die quietly in his own head.