Bob Goff - Live Original

Name Your Fears and Embrace the Extraordinary

by Bob Goff | Dec 16, 2024 | Anxiety, Featured, Freedom, Life Advice, LO Library | 0 comments

Remember the television show Fear Factor, where people confronted a few of their deepest fears? The show was canceled, but our fears don’t get resolved as easily. I’m not afraid of very many things, except sharks and spiders and snakes (which is totally normal) and venom-spitting koala bears (there is no such animal, but if there were, I know I would be afraid of them). Some people are afraid of being late or misunderstood or canceled or shunned. Some people are afraid they will lose their job, and others are afraid they will keep it.

We all have fears. What distinguishes us from each other is how we deal with our fears. Some people try to ignore them. This strategy might appear to be working in the short term, when what is actually happening is a boatload of deferral. Our unaddressed fears compound interest and grow in size and in the power they have over us.

Another approach is to confront our fears in small increments—not unlike inching our way into a cold lake by slowly shuffling our feet forward. Feet, ankles, and after a long period of time we might make it up to our knees. Progress is slow and unsatisfying. But the healthiest way to deal with our fears isn’t to grab our knees and do a cannonball in an attempt to beat them back, it is to understand them.

Plenty of times Jesus asked people who had good reason to be fearful the reason why. He asked a couple of the men in a sinking boat, “Why are you so afraid?” A seemingly unreasonable question to a boat full of guys who perhaps knew they could not swim to shore. There was no mention of life jackets, life rings, and rescue boats. These seem like questions with obvious answers, but only until you consider the circumstance more deeply and understand that there was much more going on under the surface than in the boat.

God doesn’t ask us to ignore or dismiss our fears but instead to understand them. When we figure out what our fears are attached to, we can ask God for the kind of supernatural help we need to overcome them.

Jesus doesn’t force Himself or His ideas on anyone, not on me or on you or on others, even though we are all desperately in need of His involvement in our lives. Instead, He puts the ball in our court. He asks us the unexpected questions and then waits for us to acknowledge our true needs and receive what He offers: love, acceptance, and a relationship with Him.

Sometimes God will lead us into difficult situations where our fears are triggered. His hope is that we would realize our desperate need for Him.

Think about it for a minute. What are you afraid of today? The way to take away the power fear may hold over us is to name what it is we’re afraid of, understand the origins of our fear, and then take these fears to Jesus to overcome.

Most of us can come up with a list of our concerns and fears, but what may take a little more digging is figuring out where these fears originated. If it is a fear of rejection you harbor, go back to your earliest memory of being rejected. See yourself in that time and at that place and remember what it felt like. That was you back then, but it doesn’t need to be you right now. You have changed and grown and learned what to trust and who to trust. You might ask Jesus to help you find your confidence in Him and His promise that He’s not going anywhere, ever.

I remember lying in bed the night before law school started. Tears were streaming down my cheeks, because, at orientation that day, the faculty had given their draconian version of a pep talk by saying that every third chair was eventually going to be empty because one-third of the class would flunk out the first year. No matter what end of the row I started, as I counted silently toward myself—one, two, three, one, two, three—I was always the third guy.

My first thought was to defer law school and start some other time when I had my act together. Isn’t this what a lot of us do when that fear of failure kicks in? We settle for the dissatisfaction of what we know rather than the ambiguity of what we haven’t tried yet. But settling for the ordinary when the extraordinary is right around the corner doesn’t get us anywhere.

How about this? Instead of avoiding distress, confront it. Rather than fostering a sense that failure might be near and doom is just around the corner, name what your fear is and call it out. Once it is out in the open, not only can you begin to understand it, but you also take away the power it has over you.

What fears are standing in your way? Do you struggle with a fear of failure? Maybe it’s a big, public screw up that you’re afraid of, or perhaps it is the thought of an even bigger private mess-up that is holding you back. Whatever it is, do the work to determine where that fear came from, so that you can then ask God to help you sort out what is true and what is not true and what a good plan might be moving forward to break free from those fears.

Identify what is keeping you back today and bring that to Jesus. Tell God what you are afraid of. Take Paul’s words to his younger friend Timothy to heart: “For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.”

Experience the freedom that comes from calling out what you fear as specifically as you can and then bringing it to Jesus today. Ask Him for the guts and the grit to do something about it.

Fearlessness is the opposite of being ignorant of the circumstances. It’s saying, “Notwithstanding the circumstances, I serve a mighty Lord, and He can handle this.”

Run after fearlessness with all you’ve got.

—

Goff. Published by Thomas Nelson. Available wherever books are sold.

Happiness of Pursuit

by Bob Goff | Mar 1, 2022 | Life Advice, Wisdom

How many decisions would you guess you make in a typical day? A dozen? One hundred? Does one thousand sound a little closer? Get this. Each of us makes about thirty-five thousand decisions every day. More if you spend an hour in a candy store. Some decisions are mundane, and some are major. We decide where we will live, if we will marry and who we will marry, the job we will accept and the one we will quit. The car we will buy or the bus we will take. The cake or veggies we will eat. (Go with the cake for the win.) Who we will believe and who we won’t, where we will go and how long we will stay, the faith we will embrace or ignore, and countless other decisions.

Here’s a surprising thing though: Most of us never decide to be happy. I bet most of us think “happy” is a result of other choices, but that’s not all of it. Sure, circumstances can be truly awful, but feeling happy is a choice just like any other. It’s not that we don’t want to be happy; we just get distracted by so many unhappy things that we never get back around to happiness. Perhaps we think we need an invitation or permission to be happy. And what if we want happy feelings to transition into a deep and abiding joy with a longer shelf life?

Consider this. In stark contrast to our complicated decision tree, a child makes less than 10 percent of the decisions adults make each day. Maybe one of the benefits of the childlike faith Jesus said we need is that there are fewer decisions to make, and hence, fewer distractions to manage. Have you seen a kid with a pile of Legos? It’s like the rest of the world doesn’t even exist. They are lost in the beautiful singularity of creative joy and purpose they find in their play. They don’t care if they are early or late for the next thing. They are fully present and completely undistracted. All the while, heaven dances and celebrates the simple beauty of a child at play and invites us to do the same. Perhaps we should take a lesson or two from the children around us: get fully engrossed in something lasting we care about, eliminate some of the decisions we make, and find our joy again.

Most people hope they’ll find happiness at home, but the hard truth is, they aren’t around long enough to experience what’s already waiting for them there. Simple and complicated distractions take us away from the people we love. When this occurs, the result is both subtle and toxic. We start to settle for proximity rather than presence with each other. Know what I mean? You will know this is happening to you if you only listen for the highlights in our loved one’s conversations without taking note of the emotions and body language that are also present in the room. These distractions are masked in familiar disguises like career, appointments, and promotions. They invade our homes and come dressed as extracurricular activities, sports, and electronic screens. They look like business calls and video games and Zoom conferences and television shows and committees and meetings and sometimes even churches. If we want to live more undistracted lives, we need to get real and admit that busyness is actually hijacking our joy. Here’s the good news: We can fix all this just as easily as we messed it up. Get a couple of baseball gloves and talk to your loved ones about your day as you throw the ball around. If you answer your cell phone while playing catch, you’ll lose teeth. This is what it looks like to really get some skin in the game. Get some wood and light a fire. Find some chairs and fill them with people you haven’t connected with in a while, then watch the flames dance. Go ahead and get some smoke on you, and the next day your clothes will smell like a dozen great conversations.

Do this with some urgency too. You don’t have as much time as you think you have. Take it from a guy who’s been around for a while. There’s a saying that I have found to be generally true: The days are long, but the years are short. If you fill your days with trivial stuff, you will look up one day and a year or a decade or a half-century will have passed. Don’t wait until you are old to ask yourself: What have I done with all that time? Why not ask yourself right now? What am I going to do with all the time ahead of me? What do you want your answer to be? Once you decide what you want the future to look like, make a couple of moves like your life is actually yours to live—because it is. Quit the job, call the friend, make the apology, launch the dream, take the shot . . . Heaven is just hoping we will.

Disneyland office resident. Recovering Lawyer. New York Times-bestselling author. Nonprofit founder. Mr. Chief Balloon Inflator. Motivational speaker. These are all titles that can describe Bob Goff, who’s also known for printing his real cell phone number in his first published book turned NYT bestseller, LOVE DOES which sold over two million copies. And, he gave all the money away. A recognized lawyer for over 25 years, he left it behind to become the Hon. Consul to Uganda and founded Love Does in 2001, an international nonprofit that pursues justice for children in high-conflict areas such as Uganda, Somalia, Afghanistan, Nepal, and India. More on that here.