STORY 2012: Bob Goff and a noteworthy life

"I used to think I needed to record stories,

now I know I just need to engage them."

-- Bob Goff, Love Does 

On his way to Chicago last week for the STORY conference, one of the engines stopped on Bob Goff's plane. This, he thought, was his big chance. He was seated in the exit row. He was going to get to do the thing with the door and the slide. And he was going to jump the tracks, go completely off-script: No telling passengers to lie back with their arms folded across their chest. Creatives, he said, "don't just put a toe in the water."

"YOU DO A CANNONBALL."

And not just when it comes to pools and inflatable slides in the case of emergency landings, Goff said. He meant into life.

I had sort of done a cannonball into STORY, grabbing my knees and jumping as soon as I saw pretty much all my favorite (living) authors, as well as my oh-come-on-how-have-we-not-spent-time-together-in-person? friend Bethany Suckrow, there in the pool before I realized just how high up the diving board and what a big deal all of this was. And so the night before I was sort of scrambling, printing up networking cards to exchange with new friends and borrowing back my dogeared and underlined copy of Goff's book "Love Does" from my friend Kristin and wondering whether I ought to bring my laptop to take notes and maybe live-blog the conference or if that meant I was coming at this whole thing too much like a newspaper reporter and whether a reporter really qualified as a "creative."

Luckily, Goff had the first word at the conference, and that word was this:

"I'm as creative as me, and you're as creative as you."

He had me at "interrobang," that obscure bit of punctuation that is part question mark and part exclamation point that maybe me and five other nerdy reporter types out there in the world with antique typewriters on their bookshelves at home previously had heard of. That's what life is like, he said: "There's joy. There's serious questions."

And he wanted to live a "noteworthy life," he said; that is, he wanted to be "so engaged in life, I want to take notes on it." Notes punctuated with interrobangs.

That's when I knew it was a good decision to bring the Moleskine and not the laptop to STORY (and not just because it's not a Mac, and that would have been serious sacrilege to this crowd). Probably nobody understood what I meant when I introduced myself that night at dinner as "a newspaper reporter, but I'm trying very hard not to report on this." But I understood: God had brought me to the conference to engage STORY, not just to record it.

After his session, I got into a very long line to meet Goff. I'd written an article last month for Christianity Today's Her.meneutics blog that he'd retweeted, and we'd exchanged hopeful words online about meeting at STORY. So when I handed him my copy of "Love Does" to sign and he asked who to make it out to, I introduced myself and he remembered and he grabbed me in a huge hug. He probably hugged me three times. And he wrote in my book, "You inspire me with your words!" which is all the validation I'll ever need as a writer.

They'd been handing out books in line, too, so I asked Goff to sign that one for Kristin, too. When I gave it to her this weekend, slipping the soft covers under her thumbs so she saw the author's inscription when she opened her eyes, she cried. "Emily told me all about you," he had written. (How does he always know exactly the thing to write?)

When I told her all about the conference, she cried again.

She turned to the back of her book, to a passage she remembered I had underlined in mine, and told me this had been her prayer for me while at STORY:

"I used to think I needed to record stories,
but now I know I just need to engage them."

Here are all the words, the images and the music that left me speechless at STORY, all Storified in one place. Read all my posts about STORY here.

Photo credit: Sleeping At Last / STORY / Bob Goff via @TimSomers3 on Instagram. Me, on Instagram.