It begins with the basics of a carpenter, and in the realm of first response during emergencies, Bruce Ricketson tells us that we truly live only when we stop avoiding what is best in our lives.
This time, the night was wet, and Bruce Ricketson came holding on to the stern of his ambulance and drove to another call. The sirens sang, and the city goes undefine, and the heart goes beating with the unknown. In between these bursts of light and the silence that immediately followed the emergency, however, Ricketson started to hear a question in the back of his mind, which seemed to be quieter and demanding an answer: What does it mean to really live?
That was going to be the heart throb of his memoir, All Men Die! Not Every Man Lives – the work that resulted from decades of hard work, personal striving, faith, and revelation. It is a very human tale, one that not only asks the reader to live but also to open their eyes to the world, feeling pain, fear, and purpose as bravery in life itself.
From the Workbench to the Fireline
Even before Bruce Ricketson became an author and speaker, he was a man of the trades himself, a carpenter by profession and a union brother at heart. He combined houses, bore the brunt, and shouldered the burden with other people who lived paycheck to paycheck. The teachings were straightforward: work hard, be true, and survive.
But his travels got him far away from the construction sites. Driven by a desire to help, Ricketson joined the ranks of emergency rescue workers, where he encountered the subtle division between death and life nearly every day. The task was challenging, but it made him contagious. And, when you are standing between the last breath of one human being and the next one and his right to live, he thinks, how narrow is the line, and how many people live their lives but never even live.
In every call, every tragedy, every silent ride home, Ricketson was searching for unrecovered sophistications of the meaning of it all, something that the tools and schooling could not repair.
The Personal Crisis that Altered the World.
Decades of bodily fatigue and moral instability took a toll on him, leading him to doubt his reason and even his value. I was alive, he concedes, I was not living. I had to work, managed, survived, but my soul died away.
It was then that things were emptied that the transformation started. The religion of which he had been so familiar at one time was aroused. Ricketson refers not to this awakening as a lightning stroke, but rather as a gradual, long process of reconstruction of the spirit.
Step by step, he started to realize that the purpose of life was not only to live and not to die, but to obey, be humbled, and do so with grace. The ethics, the job that taught me, were the same ones taught by the soul: you report to do whatever you can, and you be prepared at all times for whatever comes next.
A Message Rooted in Truth
In All Men Die! Not Every Man Lives, Ricketson begins his life with an open and convinced heart. He provokes the readers to examine what lies beneath the stratum of comfort and success, to the level of their own hearts. We prepare ourselves through careers, through families, or later in life, through retirement, but how often do we prepare our souls?
There is no preaching in the book, but rather workshop preaching and firetruck preaching, and post-struggle silence preaching. The language used by Rickets is simple yet sharp: the words of the man seeing the dullness of human nature and the power of divine level, of grace.
A Call to Live Fully
The message of Ricketson does not mean that someone should be perfect, but rather enduring. He helps readers remember that faith is made amidst fire, a transformation that is not done in comfort but rather in hardship. “Every scar has a story,” he says. “Every hardship is a teacher.”
In his mind, to live to one’s full extent is to put one’s heart into what is true, not success, nor even approval, but a greater contributor: purpose and service. There is something almost biblical about his quest in the temptation of a busy world moving in the opposite direction, the saying that this is the only way to live.
A Legacy of Service and Strength
Bruce Ricketson is very honest and humble today, and he is willing to share his experiences. He speaks and mentors, and reaches out to inspire others, particularly people in high-pressure careers, to seek peace in purpose and power in surrender.
The memoir is not just a tale of the strength of a single man, but it is an offer to think. It compels any reader to stop in the midst of the hurly-burly, to stop and see what they are doing, but who they are becoming. In full of living, the live wire makes us remember, it has nothing to do with evading conflict. It is about having to struggle with it, believing in it.
About Bruce Ricketson
Bruce Ricketson is a former union carpenter, a writer, and an emergency responder whose life experiences have been used as the guiding background to his book All Men Die! Not Every Man Lives. He brings to the front lines of crisis response an unconscious experience of his life and missions in the construction sites, which has given him a strong vision of purpose, service, and spiritual resilience.
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