Bruce

One of the names used as a catch-all for a New Zealand guy is Bruce. It’s one of those uniquely New Zealand things that is hard to describe exactly but that another New Zealander would easily understand. It’s a name that depicts the prototypical hardy, geeky, salt-of-the-earth sheep farmer type. Our family made good use of the name. 

After I landed in Auckland and got my luggage, I was exiting the baggage claim where the crowd of people waited to pick up passengers. All of a sudden I heard my mom and sister calling out, “Bruce, Bruce”. I thought it was kind of strange for them to be joking around like that under the circumstances but we always did enjoy a good laugh. I responded in like manner. 

What I didn’t realize was that they hadn’t even seen me yet. They were actually calling out to a YWAM friend of ours from New Zealand who, unbeknownst to me, had been on the same plane and his name actually was Bruce. They had had some concern in how hard I might be taking all of this but when they saw that I was laughing at the Bruce confusion, they realized that I was bearing up just fine.

That’s not to say that I wasn’t sad. When tragedy strikes, many people seem to try to hold their emotions in or keep them at bay or push them down. Perhaps it’s so they will not get overwhelmed. I, on the other hand, am an emotional fish. So when my father died, I wanted to feel it as much as I could. I wanted to honor his memory, in a sense, by feeling the full sadness of his passing and the great sense of loss.

He had been my best friend, even if much of that was by default. I considered him to be so because he was the most kind and loving person to me and the least judgmental. But I also wasn’t the best at developing other friendships. The days when I decided to reject the bad influence of others and to become a better Christian had produced an unintended negative corollary in the area of relationships.

My philosophy on friendships had evolved into, “It’s just me and God, anyone else is just icing on the cake.” The outworking of that had become for me to do very little to invest in friendships, mostly just leaving it to others to take any kind of initiative and letting my friendships go where they would. That may just be a guy thing in general but I unconsciously developed an investment/return type of approach to friendships, only investing in relationships with the objective of getting something back. 

My introversion also plays a large part of this. I am fine being by myself. I am also a utilitarian and a minimalist, naturally defaulting to just what I need to get by. However, even for the introvert, interaction with other people has the potential to enrich our lives and help us become better people. I have since learned to be more outward looking.

So being best friends with my dad was by default. Now that he was gone, the next in line was my brother, Samuel. Little did I know that my father’s death set in motion a series of events that would end with me finding a new best friend later that year.