The Tenpenny Files with Bruce Wolff

What picture of God do we carry into adulthood, and where did it come from?

Bruce Wolff spent years discovering that the God he struggled to trust wasn’t the God his childhood had taught him to see.

He grew up in a missionary family that seemed devoted to serving God, but behind that calling was a childhood marked by constant upheaval. His family moved nearly 30 times before he reached adulthood, living in England, Nigeria, and the United States. Nigeria became the setting for political violence, two attempts on his father’s life, and an emergency evacuation. Within months of returning home, his father began showing symptoms of ALS and died at just 36 years old, leaving Bruce’s mother to raise three boys alone.

Those experiences shaped far more than Bruce’s memories. They shaped the way he understood God.

Looking back, Bruce realized he had spent years trying to reconcile the God he read about in Scripture with the God he believed his childhood had revealed. Even the story of Job became difficult to understand. If God was loving, why did suffering seem to follow faithfulness? Why did obedience appear to come with such extraordinary loss? Those questions stayed with him into adulthood, quietly influencing his relationships, his decisions, and eventually his own marriage.

Bruce Wolff, founder and executive director of Brigade Air and author of Finding Hope: Navigating an Obscure Path: Learning to Trust God When You Can Barely Understand Him, joins Dr. Sherri Tenpenny for one of the most transparent conversations you’ll hear about faith, forgiveness, suffering, and the slow process of learning to trust God through circumstances that rarely make sense.

Bruce speaks candidly about carrying bitterness toward his parents into adulthood, the unresolved wounds that followed him for decades, and the painful realization that those wounds affected the people he loved most. Healing didn’t begin by pretending the past had never happened. It began when he came to see his parents, and himself, through the same grace he had spent years trying to understand. Standing at the foot of the Cross, he says, leaves no room for believing we’re somehow more deserving than anyone else. That lesson became one of the defining moments of his spiritual journey.

The conversation also explores spiritual warfare, the extraordinary events surrounding Bruce’s childhood in Nigeria, and the questions those experiences left behind. Rather than searching for simple explanations, Bruce reflects on what it means to trust God’s character when life refuses to fit neatly into our understanding.

One of the most memorable moments comes when Bruce explains Psalm 119:105 through the eyes of a pilot. A lamp illuminates only the ground beneath your feet. It doesn’t reveal the entire journey. As each step is taken, the path slowly comes into view. Looking back over decades of his own life, Bruce realized that God had been leading him long before he recognized where the road was going.

That realization makes the next chapter of Bruce’s story all the more remarkable. The one thing he had promised God he would never do was follow his parents into missions. Yet those same questions that once caused him to resist eventually led him to surrender. He trained as a pilot, served in missionary aviation, and later founded Brigade Air, an organization that has introduced thousands of young people to aviation and technical missions serving remote communities around the world.

Bruce’s memoir follows that journey in far greater depth, giving readers an intimate look at the decades of struggle, failure, forgiveness, healing, and quiet transformation that shaped his life. This conversation adds another dimension, allowing listeners to hear Bruce reflect on those years with the perspective that only time can bring. Together, the book and the interview offer a richer understanding than either could alone.

Whether you’ve wrestled with childhood wounds, struggled to forgive someone who hurt you, questioned why suffering touches faithful people, or found yourself wondering why trusting God sometimes feels harder than believing in Him, Bruce Wolff’s story offers an honest reminder that our understanding of God can be shaped by painful experiences, while His character remains unchanged.

Meet our Guest

Bruce Wolff is the founder and executive director of Brigade Air, a ministry dedicated to introducing young people to missionary aviation and technical missions while inspiring the next generation to serve some of the world’s most remote communities.

The son of Salvation Army missionaries who served in Africa, Bruce’s childhood was shaped by constant relocation, personal loss, and years of wrestling with difficult questions about faith. After earning his pilot certifications, he served as a missionary pilot in the southwestern United States and Mexico before founding Brigade Air in 2000. Through hands-on aviation camps, the organization has introduced thousands of young people to aviation, communications, and technical missions, helping prepare future missionaries to serve where roads, infrastructure, and traditional transportation simply do not exist.

Bruce is the author of Finding Hope: Navigating an Obscure Path: Learning to Trust God When You Can Barely Understand Him, a deeply personal memoir exploring childhood wounds, forgiveness, surrender, and discovering God’s faithfulness through life’s most difficult seasons.

Website:

https://www.brigadeair.org/

Book: https://amzn.to/4nALTRb