Bruce R. Norton Author & Advocate

York, Pennsylvania

Bruce R. Norton

Love is something you do.

I write about what happens when a person decides to love the way Scripture actually describes it — not the easy kind, the costly kind. I lead a faith-based nonprofit working to keep young people alive and families together. And most weeks you will find me behind the wheel of a motorcoach, with a busload of kids I have quietly adopted for the week.

What I am working on

Three things, one purpose

The writing, the nonprofit, and the curriculum are not separate projects. They are three ways of asking the same question: what does love actually require of us, and what changes when someone answers?

Books

Writing

True Love — twelve years of taking the Bible at its word on love, told through hospital rooms, school buses, courtrooms and broken homes, with the science that quietly agrees.

The books →

Nonprofit

Families Renewed, Inc.

A faith-based 501(c)(3) I founded and lead. Suicide and self-harm prevention is our largest undertaking, alongside homelessness prevention and support for children carrying the aftermath of abuse or neglect.

The work →

Curriculum

LifeBST

A behavioral skills framework built as a school curriculum, spanning kindergarten through twelfth grade, with college-level coursework to follow. The skills a student learns at twelve are the ones they reach for at forty.

lifebst.org →

In short

A long way around to a simple idea

I was fourteen when I started answering a crisis hotline. Twenty years as a paramedic followed, and more than forty in emergency medicine and crisis work all told. I came to faith as an adult, in a hard stretch of my life, and the question that has shaped everything since came later, in a men’s group at church: what would happen if someone actually loved others the way we are taught to in the Bible? Since then I have founded a nonprofit, written a book, and kept driving — a motorcoach now instead of an ambulance.

None of that qualifies me to tell anyone how to live. It did teach me one thing worth writing down: the love that changes people is the kind that does not leave when it gets expensive.