Love Tried: A C+ Caper Inspired by Bob Goff

How can you resist a book with balloons on the cover?

Bob Goff is the kind of crazy person I like. He talks a lot about whimsy and going on capers and how he stuck sandwiches under the wiper blades of his wife's car for months to try to get her to notice him. His book Love Does is full of crazy stories about unknowingly becoming the Ugandan consul, riding around town on a skateboard after his jeep is stolen, and inviting world leaders to sleepovers with his kids. According to Bob Goff, love just doesn't sit around and think about changing the world; love does something about it.

My roommate Ashlee and I spent the summer sitting on our front porch, drinking iced coffee and reading Love Does together. (Yes, please take a moment to acknowledge how adorable this is. Ok, your moment is over.)

After a summer of being inspired by Bob's crazy life* we decided it was time for our own caper. So we hatched a plan and set our alarms for 5:30 the next morning. 

*Note: This was also a summer of fulfilling the role of “requisite single girls” at various weddings. While I do enjoy a good hands-in-the-air-waving to celebrate this fact once in a while (many thanks to Beyonce for the fun anthem), it can get a little tiresome. So our caper included a subtle hint of let’s do something related to the fact that we don’t have boyfriends right now. But only a hint. Ok, we had balloons. More on that later.  

Time for a Caper 

Our good friends at Google told us the sun would be rising at 6:08 that morning, but it was completely light when we left the house at 6:15.

As we climbed up to a butte overlooking the city, the sun was still low on the horizon and almost as red as the deflated balloons we carried with us. Yes, we had deflated balloons. They were meant to be inflated balloons, but didn’t survive the extreme heat in our apartment the night before. Unfortunately our city does not have much of a market for 6:00 a.m. balloon peddlers.  

I’m not sure what one is supposed to bring on a proper caper, but this is what we lugged with us: 

• a thermos of Via coffee (there's a chapter in Love Does about its creator, Don Valencia) and coffee mugs
• zucchini bread
• our copy of Love Does
• two sad, red balloons 
• a Sharpie

We sat on the rocks, poured coffee, prayed, ate our breakfast, read the last two chapters of Love Does, and chatted until it was time to start our normal mornings. 

And There Were Balloons

We brought out the red balloons for our caper's grand finale. We wrote “Love Does” on one side and “The Kingdom of Heaven is near” on the other. While the latter seems like a creepy, End-Times-cultish thing to write, it is merely a joke about current relationship statuses (i.e. whenever people say things like “I feel like your time is coming soon” in relation to getting married, I think about passages in the New Testament that say Jesus is coming soon. Yes, that was more than 2000 years ago.). 

The balloons were supposed to add just a touch of whimsy to the morning. But due to their sad, deflated state, when we released them on the count of three, they just sort of...tumbled to the next layer of rocks below. 

So we packed up, left our strange doomsday litter for confused joggers or playing children to find later, and made our way back down the hill. 

Even though we didn't catch the sunrise, our Via coffee was a little too bitter, and our balloons were more pathetic than whimsical, we were satisfied with our first caper. It was a little C+, but I'd like to think Bob Goff would be proud.