Bob Goff is a lawyer who loves the word “whimsy,” a word he uses constantly. His whimsical book starts each chapter by stating what he used to think and how he changed his mind (generally along the lines of how he used to think love was a feeling but now he thinks it is an action), followed by a whimsical true story from his life to illustrate his point. His stories are full of whimsical humor and talk about Jesus as his motivation for doing good deeds– and Goff does amazing deeds, particularly in Uganda, where he helped end injustice in the prison system and provided an education for countless children who were former fighters in the civil war.
His Christian motivation is inspiring, but his theology is shallow. He calls “missing the mark” a “stupid analogy” in chapter 16, and ridicules Bible teachers who use the term. One wonders if he even knows that “missing the mark” is the literal translation for the Greek word for sin, since in chapter 29 he ridicules people who study the Hebrew and Greek background of scripture.
Goff’s love in action is admirable– but his whimsy can be annoying if you value hard work and organization, such as when he tells how he got into law school by pestering the dean instead of doing the hard work to pass the entrance exam, and how he lied to get in a friend’s hotel room and ran up a $400 room service bill before the guy arrived as a “prank.” He describes many such adventures, never with a plan, but always with whimsy. He certainly gets a lot of good things done, but he swings the pendulum so far away from planning toward risk-taking that one wonders when one of his unplanned adventures will eventually cause some regrettable disaster. So far, so good– but I won’t risk reading any more of his books.