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

Two Bunk John got off the map. He wasn’t limited by the contours of convention any longer. Instead, he leaked what he loved. He was leaking Jesus. And pretty soon the puddle he made swallowed us all by the lake it formed. That’s the way the chemistry of God’s love and our creativity work together when combined. No reservoir can hold it, no disappoi

it was Jesus who taught me there was nothing I could really lose if I had Him. He taught me to be palms up, just like He was. Palms up means you have nothing to hide and nothing to gain or lose. Palms up means you are strong enough to be vulnerable, even with your enemies. Even when you have been tremendously wronged. Jesus was palms up, to the end

That’s one of the things about love. It doesn’t recognize boundaries and never obeys the rules we try to give it. It seemed that no one had told Two Bunk or the teachers that they couldn’t change the trajectory of the kids’ educational futures, and no one apparently told these kids that they all weren’t supposed to pass the national exam.

When you decide to drop everything that’s typical, all that is left is just a big idea about an even bigger God and a world that’s worn out from the way everyone else has been doing it.

We weren’t thinking at that time about where the chain reaction would stop, and we’re still not thinking about it. I’d like to think it’s because we didn’t have a plan. We had a big idea instead. You see, the problem with my plans is that they usually work. And if they don’t seem to be working, I force them to work and I get the small results I aim

I want to be doing things today, not just flipping through crinkled and yellowed mental pictures of what happened a long time ago. I need my own vehicle to get there, though; we all do. That vehicle will look a little different for everyone. One boat size, one story size, doesn’t fit all. We each need to get into something of our own each day, some

With our own love stories, every detail comes alive. Our own love stories are so poignant, so detailed, so unforgettable— at least to us. When it’s someone else’s love story, however, we will be polite and listen, but usually it’s entirely forgettable. It’s like looking at someone else’s vacation pictures.

One of the ways I make things matter to me is to move from merely learning about something to finding a way to engage it on my own terms.

I can’t make a real need matter to me by listening to the story, visiting the website, collecting information, or wearing the bracelet about it. I need to pick the fight myself, to call it out just like I called Dale out. Then, most important of all, I need to run barefoot toward it. But I want to go barefoot because it’s holy ground; I want to be