On any given day in Breezewood, where highways knot together and traffic never really sleeps, Bruce Maxwell walks the in-between spaces most people don’t notice.
He checks the back lots and quiet corners for tents or parked cars that look a little too lived-in. He steps through side doors where truckers grab coffee between runs. He moves through busy lobbies and empty hallways, watching for the subtle signs of someone who is tired, scared, or simply out of options. For more than three decades, this has been his parish: the crossroads.
Bruce is the longtime chaplain at Breezewood Trucker-Traveler Ministries, a small office with a wide reach. From there, he offers what he calls a ministry of prayer, presence, counsel, hospitality, and emergency assistance. In plain language, that looks like food when someone is hungry, gas when they’re stranded, a safe bed when they have nowhere to stay, and a listening ear when the weight they’re carrying finally spills over.
Maxwell’s path to this work didn’t begin in a church office. He was born in Morgantown, West Virginia, but grew up in Oswego, New York, on the shores of Lake Ontario. As a young man, he studied optical engineering in Rochester and landed a job with Xerox, working as an engineer. It was solid, respectable work—exactly the sort of career many people spend their lives building toward.
But in that first year on the job, something shifted. He felt what he can only describe as a call—persistent, unshakable—to ministry.
He left engineering for seminary in Dayton, Ohio, earning a Master of Divinity and preparing, at least on paper, for parish ministry. But when it came time to choose a church, he realized that wasn’t quite where his heart was leading. Instead, he felt called to something most people would have trouble even naming.
He felt called to wander.
Bruce sold what he could, gave away the rest, and loaded what remained into his 1984 Subaru. With a Bible and a few key scriptures—especially the story of Abraham’s journey in Genesis—guiding him, he headed west. He slept under the stars, ate cold soup from cans, wrote poetry and a travelogue, and stopped to work when the money ran out. For five or six weeks he lived day to day, learning to trust that he would have what he needed when he needed it.
By the time he returned to Ohio, he carried a lesson he says he has never forgotten: providence. “God is a provider,” he learned, not as a theory but as a lived reality on the road.
What followed wasn’t glamorous. Back in Dayton, he was briefly homeless and unemployed, picking up construction work while he waited to see what God might do next. The answer came in 1992, when he heard about an unusual chaplaincy opening in a place called Breezewood, Pennsylvania—a place defined by traffic, turnpikes, and travelers.
Within 15 minutes of learning about the ministry, he knew: this was what he had been prepared for.
Since November of that year, Bruce has served as chaplain at Breezewood Trucker-Traveler Ministries, ordained as a Methodist deacon but working ecumenically in a setting where denominational lines matter far less than human need. Over 33 years, he has watched the community grow and change, seen businesses open and close, heard talk of bypasses and road projects that could reshape traffic flow. But through it all, one constant remains: people on the move still find themselves in trouble, and they still need someone to meet them with compassion.
His work is threefold. He serves truck drivers and their families, travelers passing through, and the employees who keep Breezewood’s many businesses running. Calls come from frontline workers at gas stations and restaurants, from the local hospital, from state police, from agencies throughout the region. They arrive when someone has nowhere to sleep, no way to get back to a vehicle, no food, or no safe place to go after a crisis.
Sometimes the help looks simple—a ride, a hot meal, a fuel card. Sometimes it’s far more complicated: arranging shelter in another county when local options are full, coordinating with recovery programs, or simply sitting with someone whose life has unraveled faster than they can explain it.
Bruce is quick to say he doesn’t do it alone. Behind every act of help stands a network of churches, agencies, and volunteers. A 15-person management committee—pastors, retired teachers, business owners and more—handles the finances, planning, and fundraisers that keep the ministry going. Congregations assemble traveler care packets stocked with hygiene items and snacks. Food drives collect canned goods and staples that Bruce passes along to those living in motel rooms, cars, or temporary shelters.
There are hospitality tables set up several times a year at peak travel times—Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s, Easter, Memorial Day, July 4, Labor Day—where church groups share baked goods, small gifts, and conversation with weary drivers and travelers. Bruce calls those days “pure mission,” when all he has to do is stand behind a table and give things away in the name of grace.
And then there are the stories.
He remembers the morning a couple walked into the weekly Bible study that meets just down the hall from his office. They said they’d left home the night before on what sounded like a spontaneous spiritual journey. They had no extra clothes, no toothbrush, no real plan. The group welcomed them, listened, and afterward Bruce and a friend led them to the ministry office and loaded them up with food, sleeping bags, clothing, hats, gloves and gift cards.
But something, he says, “just didn’t feel right.” He and his colleague compared notes after the couple left and found that parts of their story didn’t quite line up.
Ten minutes later, the woman came back alone, shaking. She asked for paper to write a note to her father. As she wrote, Bruce and his colleague gently asked whether she was safe. The first time, she said yes. The second time, she said, “Yes—for now,” and quietly revealed the truth of an abusive relationship, a recent assault, and the fear that if her companion knew she was reaching out, she would be hurt again.
What unfolded in the next few hours involved a note, a phone call to a worried father, cooperation with law enforcement, and a swift response down the road. By that evening, the man was in custody and the woman was safe. Bruce still marvels at how a Bible study on the second floor of a crossroads plaza became the unlikely setting for a rescue that began with a shaking hand and a plea for help she could barely voice.
Not every story is dramatic, but many are deeply human.
There was the young couple with two dogs who wandered into town after months of crisscrossing the country by train, tattooed, pierced, and trying to figure out who they were. Beneath the road-worn appearance were two kids from good families, still grieving the loss of an older brother killed in a motorcycle accident. Their travels were an attempt to outrun sorrow. When they finally worked up the courage to call home, Bruce drove them to meet the young man’s father at a small airport. He watched as father and son embraced on the tarmac, a scene that brought to mind the biblical story of the prodigal son and the patient father who never stopped waiting.
Listening to these stories, it becomes clear that Bruce’s own love of travel and adventure didn’t disappear when he hung up his engineer’s badge. It simply found a new expression. He jokes that he lives vicariously through the truck drivers and travelers who pass through his office, but his empathy runs deeper than that. He knows what it is to be on the road with no guarantees, to sleep under unfamiliar skies and depend on kindness that hasn’t arrived yet.
At home in Everett, Bruce’s life is anchored by his family. He and his wife Roxanne have three children—Nathaniel, Kaitlyn, and Kevin—whose paths stretch from music to engineering to high school hallways. Their house hums with piano practice, band rehearsals, and symphony preparations. Even their yard bears a testament to their shared love of nature: a little sign reading “Maxwell Bird Sanctuary,” a nod to the many feathered visitors their son Kevin coaxes in with feeders and care.
Still, every day, Bruce returns to Breezewood, to the plaza where trucks idle and cars stream past. He walks through the door of a ministry he never knew existed until the day he answered its call, and he does what he’s been doing for 33 years—showing up with open hands and a quiet conviction that grace belongs at the crossroads.
“It’s a wonderful partnership,” he says of the churches, donors, and volunteers who make the work possible. In his mind, they do the heavy lifting: the sacrifices, the giving, the organizing behind the scenes.
He sees his role a bit more simply.
“I have the easy job,” he says. “I get to share God’s grace with whoever walks through the door.”
