Welcome To My Blog

Today I get to drive north to Canada and join some friends as we travel up to Bob Goff’s lodge. I tell the story of Bob in A Million Miles in a Thousand Years. Actually, I only tell part of Bob’s story. Most of Bob’s story is too unbelievable to relay in a book and have anybody actually believe any of it. I met Bob while kayaking about 50 miles from the nearest road. He’d built a beautiful lodge near a Young Life camp where he could practice hospitality with the staff at Young Life and also entertain world leaders. It was an accidental meeting, but it was one of those accidents that explodes blessings into your life. I think Bob is probably the most influential person in my adult life. His faith knows no bounds. I want to tell you a little about him because the more Bob stories I hear, the more it makes me want to live an exceptional life. Without Bob, I doubt Million Miles would have ever been written, because I doubt I would have ever realized how remarkable life can actually be.

Here are just some tip of the iceberg “facts” about Bob. He graduated high school and decided he wanted to be a lawyer, so he went to his local law school and applied. He was rejected because his grades weren’t good enough. So he sat outside the deans office for days and asked the dean if he would please let him in. After about a week of stalking the dean, the dean told him to go buy his books. Bob got married and lived in ramshackle housing so that his kids could have a boat. They really wanted a boat. He visited Uganda and as the law firm grew a little bit, Bob used the money to build a school. And though the kids at Bob’s school in Uganda were poor, they actually started growing crops and selling them to provide AID for kids in America that needed help. Bob became friend with enough government officials in Uganda that he was asked to become Uganda’s American Consulate. He used his law firm in the states to prepare cases for people held in Ugandan prisons. He also influenced the government to bring the court system back to Northern Uganda after the civil war, reestablishing justice in the region. One of Bob’s friends wrote the Ugandan Constitution, and when Bob read it, he realized there was no clause stating a non-Ugandan couldn’t serve in their court, so he lobbied the government to let him on. Essentially, he was asking Uganda to let a white American serve in their court. Bob resigned his position as Consulate and handed it to his law partner, and the paperwork that would make him an official Ugandan judge is currently on the president’s desk. When Bob’s kids were young, they wrote to all the world leaders, asking them if they could come interview them and ask what they hope in. Twenty-nine world leaders said yes, so Bob and his wife Maria traveled the world with the kids, interviewing world leaders. Bob and his wife also bought a house across the street from the Supreme Court in DC, hoping that Republican and Democratic Senators would live there for free, as long as they agreed to get along. They didn’t, and so Bob and Maria sold the house. Oh well.

Bob is a “do” guy. He wants to get to the “do” part of faith. Bob has shown me that while there’s some power in planning, it’s the living part where God shows up. It’s the living and loving that matters.

One of the things I get to do while I’m up at the lodge all week is help Bob write his book. It’s a book of little vignettes about how knowing Jesus has changed his paradigm on any number of topics. He tells wonderful stories of meeting world leaders, then goes right into a story about losing a job as a waiter because he farted at the table while poring wine. You are going to love this book. And I can’t wait for you to meet my friend, at least in the pages of the book.

If you’d like to follow Bob on twitter, simply follow @bobgoff.

All that said, there’s no cell coverage out at Bob’s lodge, and almost no internet, so I’ll be turning the blog over to the fate of the internet. If there’s a technical difficulty, I won’t be able to fix it. The blog will continue in a “best of” series. Some of the entries have gotten hundreds of comments and thousands of facebook shares, and I’ll be revisiting a few of those every day next week. I won’t be able to tweet any reminders, so be sure to check back.

So be inspired by Bob. We need more beautiful stories. We need more risky stories. What kind of story are you living?