When I first started reading Bruchko I was drawn into how easy it was to relate to Bruce, the main character. The fact that he isn’t someone with impressive titles and connections is what makes it most striking. He was just an everyday kid from Minnesota, there was nothing more impressive about him that could make you brush aside his story with excuses like “if I had his kind of money..” or “if I had friends in high places...” then (and only then) “I could be great like him. No, in line with some of the biblical greats like Moses, he was the character with bad vision, bouts of bronchitis, the type who seemed least fit for the position. He didn’t even have the support of his family in going out into the mission field.
But as I got further into the book, something different really started to move me—what he did have, his genuine faith, his answering to the call God had placed personally on his life. He didn’t know anyone in Venezuela, didn’t have any support from the missions board, didn’t know Spanish but he went anyway, and yet he didn’t let what he didn’t have or know hold him back from God’s calling on his life. When the missionaries he met and began to count on socially eventually cut him off completely for defying the missions board and attending catholic mass, he didn’t give up and go home but looked at his identity in Jesus instead, who never rejects us, and continued on after what he believed to be God’s plan and kept the perspective that God could use even that for his (Bruce's) own good.
On the one hand it may its hard to relate to eating worms and living among uncivilized people specifically, but on the other hand, it was easy to relate to how God had placed a very specific calling on his heart, even though it made no logical sense at times, and how he was faithful to God in persevering through the suffering to really make that difference for the kingdom.
He did much for the Kingdom. He was able to bring a tribe that had never heard of Jesus into one that had. He was able to translate the bible stories into their language, and even translate some of the figures of speech such that they were culturally understandable (the example of about building one’s house on a rock (firm foundation) being translated into a story about hanging your sleeping hammock from God’s poles comes to mind). Examples like that throughout the book also drew out the importance of cultural sensitivity in missions to me in a very vivid, tangible way.
Also, when Bruce talked about how he realized he wanted to experience God’s glory without going through the suffering, that spoke to me about the necessity of suffering for Christ, going through pain and whatnot so that when that glory is reached it cost you something—like that scripture where the man wouldn’t make the offering that cost him nothing. Bruce had to pay a lot of physical price to get to experience the glory of really being used by God to reach the Motilones. For him, it was suffering a lot of diseases (I can’t even imagine suffering through Measles and Pinkeye and half of what he went through)—but that’s not everyone’s cross to bear.
