Start Here: Kissed by Death

By Dylan Verdun Sullivan

As I sit with my morning coffee, with my two study buddies Ninja and Ember this space exists for a reason.

This is not just a blog.

This is where everything connects.

I am Dylan Verdun Sullivan an Australian author and founder of Refined by Fire Press. My work, including Kissed by Death and Refined by Fire, is indexed in the National Library of Australia.
What you’ll find here is not polished religion or surface-level reflection.
This is lived experience written from the middle of trauma, addiction, survival, and faith.
Kissed by Death is the backbone of it all.
It tells the story of what happens when life breaks you and what it means to be rebuilt.

👉 Read the memoir Kissed by Death→

From here, the writing carries on.
Some pieces are reflections.
Some are wrestlings.
Some are written in the quiet places where God meets us when nothing else makes sense.
If you’ve ever walked through darkness this space is for you.

About the Author
Dylan Verdun Sullivan is the founder of Refined by Fire Press and an Australian author indexed in the National Library of Australia. As a Level 7 Local Guide with over 1.7 million views on Google Maps, he documents the intersection of faith, recovery, and the light found in ordinary places.

📖 Read the Memoir: Kissed by Death on Amazon
📍 Explore the Journey: Follow Dylan on Google Maps

Comments

Post a Comment

From the Fire

A Week Ignited: Brotherhood, Openness, and the Quiet Work of God

By Dylan Verdun Sullivan
Wow  what a start to the week. I’ve been sitting with Saturday for a couple of days now, letting it settle, letting it breathe, letting it speak in its own way before rushing to put words around it. There are moments in life that are better written immediately, while the emotion is still raw and close to the surface. But there are other moments that need time time to process, time to reflect, time to understand what was actually taking place beneath what we could see. Saturday felt like one of those moments. Kings Church connect group at Paradise Point . A simple setting on the surface. A lunchtime barbecue. Men gathered. Food cooking. Conversations unfolding. Nothing overly structured. Nothing forced. But what took place in that space carried far more weight than what it looked like from the outside. And I think that’s what has stayed with me the most. Letting the Moment Settle I was going to write on Saturday. I really was. I felt it stirring in me as I left. Tha...
Continue Reading →

Writing From the Middle of It

By Dylan Verdun Sullivan
As I finished up my second last week at Woolworths before stepping into a new season at the Gold Coast University Hospital , on the eve of Good Friday , I found myself in a strange kind of space. Not quiet. Not chaotic. Just full. It’s a wild thing how even on days where your mind is locked into movement goals, timelines, responsibilities, things that need to be done  something deeper can still cut through all of it without warning. You can be thinking about shifts, routines, what’s next, what needs to be done… and then something from another season just breaks through the surface like it was never gone. That’s what happened to me. As I was walking into work, just moving through what should have been a normal moment, a memory came flooding back. Not gently. Not subtly. It hit with weight. It took me straight back to a season I haven’t fully stepped away from, even if time says I should have by now. A season where I was writing my first book — Kissed by Death  My journey to fi...
Continue Reading →

An Unsent Beginning

By Dylan Verdun Sullivan
 Some words aren’t written to be understood. They’re written because they refuse to stay inside. This space exists for the things I never sent , the thoughts that didn’t belong in conversations, the prayers that didn’t resolve into answers, the moments that were too honest for performance. I’ve learned that not everything needs a destination. Some things just need a place to rest. What you’ll find here won’t be lessons or instructions. There will be no tidy endings, no motivational arcs, no promise that pain always makes sense in hindsight . There will be faith, but not the polished kind. There will be struggle, spoken quietly. There will be days when hope is loud and days when it barely whispers. This is not a journal written for an audience. It’s a record of what survives the day. What remains after the noise has burned off. What’s left when honesty is the only option. If these words resonate, that’s enough. If they don’t, that’s also enough. Some letters are never sent because t...
Continue Reading →

Christ in the Middle of the Fire

By Dylan Verdun Sullivan
This week has been a beautiful mixture of struggling with past wounds and patterns and deep revelations from Christ. Some weeks feel heavy in ways that are difficult to explain. Old memories surface, patterns you thought you had already buried rise again, and you begin to see parts of yourself that you wish were not still there. But at the very same time, there are also moments where Christ reveals something deeper, something clearer, something that steadies the soul in the middle of the struggle. That is what this week has felt like. A strange but beautiful tension between wrestling with the past and experiencing fresh understanding of who Jesus really is. Bible college yesterday became a powerful foundation for the entire week. As I sat among other students and opened the Scriptures together, I felt that quiet sense again that God is forming something in my life. The topic that anchored our study was the apostle Paul’s letter to the Ephesians . The book of Ephesians is one of those...
Continue Reading →

Learning to Think Deeply About God in the Middle of Life

By Dylan Verdun Sullivan
 There are seasons in life when the mind begins to slow down and look more carefully at the deeper things. Not because everything is suddenly calm. Not because all of life’s questions have been answered. But because something inside you begins to hunger for understanding in a deeper way than before. That is the season I find myself in right now. For much of my life, faith was something deeply personal. It was something I clung to in moments of pain, moments of fear, moments when life felt as though it could collapse beneath the weight of circumstances. Faith was not theoretical for me. It was survival. It was the quiet anchor that kept me steady when everything else felt unstable. But over time, something else began to grow alongside that faith. A desire to understand. Not simply to believe that God is real, but to think deeply about who He is. To explore the theology behind the truths that had already become real in my life through experience. That desire has led me into a season ...
Continue Reading →