Steward of Fire
Wow.
After over 12 months of planning, late nights, emails, prayers, and tears… my restoration project of Holy Ghost Sermons by is complete.
Even writing that sentence feels surreal.
For a long time this project lived only as an idea. Something stirring quietly in the background of my mind. A sense that there was something valuable buried in the past — something that needed to be brought forward again, restored, handled carefully, and released back into the hands of people.
But ideas are easy.
Execution is where the weight lives.
And this project carried weight.
The Beginning of the Fire
I still remember when the thought first took hold.
It wasn’t just about republishing an old text.
It felt deeper than that.
There was something about Maria Woodworth-Etter’s ministry — the rawness, the power, the way God moved through her life at a time when the world looked very different — that stirred something in me.
Her life was not polished.
It was not easy.
In fact, it was marked by deep personal suffering.
Maria lost five of her six children to death — a reality that is almost impossible to comprehend. That kind of grief does not leave a person untouched. It reshapes everything.
And yet, in the midst of that suffering, she continued.
Not with shallow faith.
Not with borrowed strength.
But with what can only be described as an unquenchable reliance on God.
When she preached, it was not from theory.
It was from a life that had been broken and yet sustained.
She preached with the unquenchable power of the Holy Spirit.
And when I began reading her sermons, I could feel something in them that felt alive.
Not just historically interesting.
Alive.
There was fire in those words.
But there was also a problem.
The text I found was broken.
OCR errors.
Distorted sentences.
Fragments of meaning lost in poor scanning.
Words that once carried power now felt fractured and disjointed.
And I remember sitting there thinking:
This matters too much to leave like this.
That was the moment the project began.
The Hidden Work No One Sees
Restoration work is not glamorous.
There is no spotlight.
No immediate reward.
Just long hours of quiet, focused effort.
Line by line.
Word by word.
Sentence by sentence.
Correcting errors.
Checking references.
Making sure the original voice was preserved without distortion.
There were moments where it felt tedious.
Moments where I questioned whether anyone would even notice the difference.
Moments where the sheer scale of the task felt overwhelming.
But something kept pulling me forward.
A sense of responsibility.
A sense that I was not just editing a text.
I was stewarding something.
What It Means to Be a Steward
That word has stayed with me throughout this entire process.
Steward.
A steward does not own what they carry.
They are entrusted with it.
Responsible for it.
Accountable for how they handle it.
That realization changed the way I approached the project.
This was not my work in the sense of authorship.
It was entrusted work.
Maria Woodworth-Etter carried something in her generation.
A message.
A testimony.
A fire.
And now, in some small way, I was holding a piece of that.
Not to reshape it.
Not to modernize it beyond recognition.
But to preserve it faithfully.
To clean what had been distorted.
To restore what had been lost.
To present it with clarity and integrity.
That is what stewardship looks like.
It is not about adding your voice over something.
It is about honoring the voice that came before you.
The Tension Between Accuracy and Spirit
One of the most challenging parts of this project was navigating the tension between technical accuracy and spiritual integrity.
On one hand, the text needed to be cleaned.
Errors corrected.
Grammar stabilized where necessary.
Sentences made readable.
On the other hand, there was a deeper concern.
I did not want to lose the tone.
The weight.
The fire in her words.
Maria Woodworth-Etter did not write in a polished modern voice.
Her words carried urgency.
Repetition.
Conviction.
So every decision mattered.
Every edit had to be weighed carefully.
Was I clarifying?
Or was I softening something that was meant to remain sharp?
That required patience.
Discernment.
And restraint.
Because sometimes the most faithful decision was to leave a sentence exactly as it was.
The Emotional Weight of the Process
This project was not just technical.
It was emotional.
There were nights where I sat with the text and felt the weight of it deeply.
Moments where the words on the page seemed to press into my own life.
Moments where I had to pause, not because of the work, but because of what the work was stirring inside me.
Restoration is not just about documents.
It is about encounter.
And over these past 12 months, this project became more than something I was working on.
It became something that was working on me.
Shaping me.
Refining me.
Challenging me.
There were tears.
Real ones.
Because I could feel that this mattered.
A First Under Refined by Fire Press
This is my first restoration project under Refined by Fire Press.
That alone is something I am still trying to process.
To think that this work will now sit alongside my own published titles… it is hard to comprehend.
Kissed by Death.
Refined by Fire.
And now, this.
A restored work from a revivalist who carried fire in her generation.
There is something deeply humbling about that.
Because these are not just books.
They represent different streams of my journey.
My story.
My theology.
And now, my stewardship.
To see them sitting side by side feels like more than an achievement.
It feels like a responsibility.
Why This Matters
Some might ask why restore a book like this.
Why invest this much time into something written over a century ago?
Because truth does not expire.
Because what God has done in history still speaks into the present.
Because there are voices from the past that still carry weight for today.
Maria Woodworth-Etter’s ministry was marked by revival.
Lives changed.
People encountering God in ways that disrupted everything they thought they knew.
That kind of history matters.
Not as nostalgia.
But as testimony.
And testimony carries power.
The Quiet Completion
And now… it is complete.
There is a strange stillness in that realization.
After 12 months of constant engagement, the work has reached its end.
The files are finished.
The text is clean.
The structure is set.
Nothing left to correct.
Nothing left to refine.
Just… completion.
Not loud celebration.
Not a dramatic moment.
Just a deep, quiet awareness that the work has been carried to the end.
And in that stillness, one word rises above everything else.
Gratitude.
The Fire Continues
This was never just about restoring a book.
It was about stewarding something that carries fire.
And fire, when handled with care, does not fade.
It moves.
From one generation to the next.
This project is now part of that movement.
And I am grateful — deeply grateful — to have been trusted with it.
After over 12 months of planning, late nights, emails, prayers, and tears…
It is complete.
And the fire continues.
About the Author
Dylan Verdun Sullivan is the founder of Refined by Fire Press and an Australian author indexed in the National Library. As a Level 7 Local Guide with over 1.2M views on Google Maps, he documents the intersection of faith, recovery, and the "light in the mundane."
- Read the Memoir: Kissed by Death on Amazon
- Explore the Journey: Follow Dylan on Google Maps
- Connect on Instagram: @porkysparadise
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