Opening
Across these chapters, Brant Hansen reframes the world’s brokenness as the backdrop that makes moments of goodness shimmer. He invites readers to trade offense for awe, self-assertion for rest, and self-righteousness for humility—an inner reorientation that reshapes everyday life before God.
What Happens
Chapter 6: BEAUTIFUL EXCEPTIONS
Hansen shifts from expecting human brokenness to celebrating the “beautiful exceptions” that break into ordinary life—acts of love, sacrifice, and forgiveness that feel like flashes of another kingdom. He highlights a man who forgives the driver who costs him his legs, and a widow in Afghanistan who forgives her husband’s murderer. These aren’t normal, he says; they are glimpses of God’s kingdom in a fallen world, worthy of wonder rather than cynicism.
He then tells a personal story from his radio work: a wife emails him about her husband, imprisoned for his Christian faith in a brutal Middle Eastern regime. The man and his cellmates secretly listen to Hansen’s show through a smuggled phone. Hansen races to the studio and, without compromising security on-air, speaks directly to the prisoner, plays songs of hope, and assures him he isn’t forgotten—an intimate beam of grace into darkness.
Hansen concludes that gratitude and anger cannot coexist. So he chooses to notice the “glorious exceptions” and let them recalibrate his attention, making The Choice to Be Unoffendable joyful and grounded in Grace and Forgiveness.
Chapter 7: THE WORLD’S WORST BEDTIME STORY
Hansen retells Sheldon Vanauken’s allegory of two dogs, Gypsy and Snowball, who live with a loving master. Snowball obeys the master’s call and flourishes. Gypsy, seduced by rabbit-chasing “freedom,” ignores the call, gets leashed, then finally runs off for good—lost, lonely, and far from the master she actually misses. The story becomes a stark picture of human choice: trust God’s path to freedom or chase autonomy that ends in isolation.
He applies this to offense. Faced with a snide online comment from “Bob371,” you have two options: stew, craft snarky replies, and lose an evening to agitation—or let it go and enjoy your life. Hansen confesses he’s often chosen the exhausting route, including nursing a grudge for eight years against a church organist who threatened him at an amusement park.
Jesus’s promise of rest, he says, is not just for the afterlife; it’s a practical invitation now. When we refuse to be offended and obey Jesus, we step into tangible peace.
Chapter 8: AIN’T YOU TIRED?
Hansen explores a countercultural way of life: choosing rest over hustle. His family takes a lower-paying job to gain time together, and neighbors notice their unhurried rhythms—one even says watching them makes him think about God. The point lands: the frantic chase for status makes us brittle and easily offended because people inevitably block our ambitions. Choosing rest becomes an act of resistance.
He critiques church subculture for fueling exhaustion with endless programs and metrics—the “Discipleship Wheel.” He recalls handing a high schooler, Michael, a pie chart of spiritual disciplines, turning life with God into a to-do list. True rest grows from surrender, not performance—from realizing we have nothing to prove. He ends with a line from The Help: Aibileen asks the furious Hilly, “Ain’t you tired?” Hansen turns that question toward readers exhausted by outrage and judgment.
Chapter 9: REVEREND OF THE DUMPSTER
A pastor throws away his porn, then tries to fish it back out—falls into the dumpster, breaks his arm, and gets found by his wife. Hansen calls this picture our shared reality: “we’re all the Dumpster Pastor.” He imagines a “Dumpster Church,” a company of the caught and forgiven, where joy displaces judgment because everyone knows they’ve been exposed and loved.
This awareness, he argues, detonates our anger. Our entitlement to outrage shrinks in proportion to our honesty about our own guilt. The crucifixion publicly exposes humanity’s sin, and Jesus’s Parable of the Unmerciful Servant hammers the point home: compared to our incalculable debt to God, others’ offenses against us are tiny. We are the debtor with the greater sum. This truth crushes Humility vs. Self-Righteousness in our hearts and strips away our supposed “right” to hold a grudge.
Chapter 10: IDEA: LET’S PUNCH BRANT IN THE FACE
Hansen goes after self-righteousness by parodying himself. He remembers wearing a “Smoking Stinks” T-shirt to telegraph moral superiority and rattles off a gleaming list of disciplined choices—living debt-free, abstaining from alcohol, giving generously—then asks, “How do you like me now?” He assumes the honest answer: you want to punch him. Moral résumés don’t address the question the heart really asks: Does God love me?
To prove he’s no better than anyone else, he confesses stealing roughly $600 of content from a colleague’s subscription site for a year using a borrowed password. He finally calls to confess and offer payment—and is met with immediate, total forgiveness. That grace cements his conviction: pretending to have it all together is empty. People are drawn not to spiritual polish but to humility and love. Rejecting offense and sanctimony opens actual relationships—and leaves transformation to God.
Character Development
Hansen’s voice shifts from teacher to fellow struggler, modeling the humility he claims is essential to living unoffendable. He exposes his own failures to puncture any aura of moral authority.
- He admits wasting an evening (and years) stewing over petty slights, including an eight-year grudge against a church organist.
- He critiques his past as a youth leader who handed students a performance-driven “Discipleship Wheel.”
- He lampoons his own sanctimony with the “punch me in the face” list of virtues.
- He publicly confesses theft from a colleague, embracing his identity as a forgiven “Dumpster Pastor” rather than an expert.
Themes & Symbols
Humility vs. Self-Righteousness: Hansen insists that anger thrives on the illusion of our relative innocence. The “Dumpster Pastor” image shatters that illusion; once we see our own public need for mercy, self-righteousness collapses. With the ground cut from under our outrage, forgiveness becomes not heroic but obvious.
Grace and Rest: Grace—whether in startling public acts of forgiveness or a colleague’s private pardon—arrives as a “beautiful exception” that reorients attention and affection. Rest functions as the embodied symbol of an unoffendable life: a refusal to hustle for worth or defend ego. Surrender to God frees people from the exhausting work of scorekeeping, grudge-carrying, and image maintenance, replacing agitation with peace.
Anger’s Exhaustion: Throughout, anger appears not merely wrong but wearying—a drain on time, joy, and relationships. The refrain “Ain’t you tired?” exposes outrage as a choice that sabotages the very flourishing we want.
Key Quotes
“Gratitude and anger cannot coexist.” This claim reframes offense as a focus problem: what we attend to shapes our inner life. By choosing to notice “beautiful exceptions,” we starve resentment and nourish worship.
“Ain’t you tired?” Lifted from The Help and aimed at a self-justifying heart, the question functions like a mirror. It exposes the cost of outrage—how much energy it demands—and invites a gentler, freer way.
“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” (Matthew 11:28) Hansen treats Jesus’s promise as present-tense reality, not future consolation. Laying down anger and offense becomes part of the yoke that proves easy and the burden light.
“We’re all the Dumpster Pastor.” This image levels the room. The shared humiliation and forgiveness demolish hierarchies, making ongoing anger feel absurd and a grace-filled community feel possible.
“How do you like me now?” Hansen weaponizes self-satire to reveal the repellence of moral grandstanding. The line exposes the hunger for approval underneath self-righteous posturing—and why it pushes people away.
Why This Matters and Section Significance
Chapters 6–10 provide the book’s core engine: unoffendability doesn’t come from trying harder to be nice; it comes from realizing we have no standing to be offended in the first place. By dismantling self-righteousness through parable, confession, and theological clarity, Hansen removes the scaffolding that holds anger aloft.
The result is practical and immediate. Expect human brokenness. Marvel at grace. Choose rest over hustle. Confess rather than pose. As these chapters connect sin, grace, humility, and rest, the book shifts from advice to a livable vision: a community of “Dumpster Pastors,” too grateful and too free to keep nursing a grudge.