When the Fire Travels: From the Gold Coast to Papua New Guinea

 Wow, I didn’t expect this news today.

A day before my fiancée’s birthday I received confirmation through correspondence that my published devotional Refined by Fire: Finding God in the Furnace of Trauma is heading to a Christian ministry in Papua New Guinea as a study guide for the leaders, the students, and the future John the Baptists that God is raising up.

I am honestly so humbled.

And I am excited to see what the Lord has done with this book in just three months since publishing.

When I wrote Refined by Fire, I did not write it with any grand strategy or global ambition. I wrote it out of obedience. I wrote it because I felt compelled to tell the truth about suffering, faith, and the strange way God meets us in the furnace of life.

This devotional was born out of a long road.

My life has been shaped by pain from the beginning. I was born with serious medical complications and have undergone 26 major operations under the Mater Hospital in Brisbane. Hospitals, surgical lights, recovery rooms, and long seasons of uncertainty were part of my childhood and early adulthood.

Those experiences leave marks on a person.

They shape how you see the world, how you see yourself, and often how you wrestle with God.

Later in my life I faced addiction, broken relationships, and deep internal battles that many people never see. There were moments where life felt overwhelming and fragile.

Then when I was eighteen, my life collided with death itself.

I contracted meningococcal disease, and everything changed overnight.

Anyone who has encountered that illness knows how brutally fast it moves. One moment you are living an ordinary life, and the next moment you are staring into the abyss.

For me, that moment became something far more than a medical crisis.

It became a spiritual turning point.

In the darkness of that experience, when my body was shutting down and my future looked uncertain, I encountered something I still struggle to fully explain with words. My life, which had felt so chaotic and fractured, suddenly came face to face with the reality of eternity.

And in that moment I believe Jesus met me.

Not as an abstract theological concept.

But as a living presence.

That experience reshaped my entire understanding of life, suffering, and grace.

It did not magically erase all the struggles that followed. Anyone who has walked with God knows that transformation often unfolds slowly, painfully, and through many layers of healing.

But something changed in the core of my soul.

Over the years that followed I continued to wrestle with life, addiction, insecurity, and identity. Yet through it all I began to see a pattern forming.

God was not avoiding the fire in my life.

He was using it.

The imagery of fire became central to how I understood my journey. Fire destroys, but it also refines. It burns away impurities, but it can also reveal strength that would never emerge otherwise.

That is where the title Refined by Fire came from.

This devotional is not written from the perspective of someone who has everything figured out. It is written from the perspective of someone who has spent years asking God difficult questions.

Why suffering?

Why trauma?

Why does pain sometimes seem to arrive in waves throughout a lifetime?

But over time I began to see something profound.

God often does His deepest work not in comfort, but in the furnace.

Throughout scripture we see this pattern again and again. The prophets were shaped in wilderness seasons. David was formed in caves long before he wore a crown. The apostles walked through persecution and hardship that refined their faith.

Even Jesus Himself walked through suffering.

The Garden of Gethsemane reveals a Savior who understands anguish. On the cross we see the ultimate demonstration that God does not stand distant from human suffering. He steps into it.

When I wrote Refined by Fire, I wanted to create something that speaks honestly to people walking through their own furnaces.

Not with shallow answers.

Not with clichés.

But with the kind of honesty that says: God is present even when the fire burns.

That is why hearing that this devotional will be used as a study guide for leaders and students in Papua New Guinea is something that humbles me deeply.

Papua New Guinea is a place where faith runs deep and where many ministries are raising up passionate young believers who carry a hunger for God that often challenges the comfortable Christianity found in many parts of the Western world.

To think that words written in my quiet corner of the Gold Coast, Australia, could travel across the ocean and find their way into the hands of leaders and students there is something I never imagined when I first sat down to write.

Books have a mysterious journey.

They begin in solitude.

A writer alone with their thoughts, their questions, their experiences.

But once those words are released into the world, they begin traveling into places the author may never see.

Into conversations.

Into late-night reading moments.

Into classrooms, ministries, and discipleship groups.

And sometimes into the lives of people who are searching for hope in the middle of their own fire.

The thought that this devotional could contribute, even in a small way, to the formation of future leaders and evangelists in Papua New Guinea is something that fills me with gratitude.

I especially love the idea that some of those students might become the “John the Baptists” of their generation — voices crying out in the wilderness, preparing the way for the Lord.

John the Baptist was not a polished religious figure. He was a wild voice in the desert, calling people back to repentance and awakening hearts to the coming of Christ.

Our world still needs voices like that.

People who are not afraid of the wilderness.

People who are not afraid of the fire.

People whose faith has been forged through real struggle rather than comfortable theory.

If Refined by Fire can encourage even a handful of leaders to understand that God often shapes His servants through the furnace, then every difficult chapter of my own story becomes worthwhile.

Because the truth is this:

Pain does not have the final word.

God does.

And sometimes the very experiences that nearly break us become the tools God uses to build something meaningful through our lives.

Three months ago this devotional was simply a finished manuscript.

Today it is traveling to another nation.

That alone is a reminder that God can do far more with our obedience than we can imagine.

I do not know what the future holds for this book.

But I do know this:

If even one person reads it and discovers that their suffering does not mean God has abandoned them, then the fire that shaped these pages will have served its purpose.

So today I am grateful.

Grateful for the journey.

Grateful for the ministry in Papua New Guinea.

Grateful that something born in the furnace of my own life is now traveling into the lives of others.

Sometimes the smallest seeds God plants can grow in places we never expected.

And sometimes the fire we feared the most becomes the place where God quietly begins to build something eternal.