Quiet Unfiltered Notes: From the Fire

28th July 2026 Two days ago I turned another year older. I did not spend it quietly. Bianca and I spent the day together celebrating, reflecting, sitting with everything the past twelve months have carried. The good and the hard. The breakthroughs and the losses. The moments that confirmed something was shifting and the moments that reminded me how far there still is to go. It was one of the best days I have had in a long time. And today, two days after, I am sitting with it all. Trying to find words for a year that refuses to be summarised neatly. Because it wasn't neat. It was full. Complicated. Costly in places. Astonishing in others. This is my attempt to tell the truth about it. I need to say something clearly before I say anything else. This was not a year of arriving. It was a year of becoming. Which is a different thing entirely. Arriving implies a destination reached, a milestone crossed, a chapter concluded with something resembling resolution. Becoming is messier than t...

Tonight I find myself sitting quietly after another evening reading through the writings of Maria Woodworth-Etter . The room is silent except for the gentle turning of fragile pages that have somehow survived more than a century. Every now and then I stop reading. Not because I am tired. But because I become overwhelmed by what I am actually holding in my hands. It is difficult to explain. I am not simply reading an old manuscript. I am sitting with the testimony of a woman whom God used to awaken countless people to Himself. Every page carries the weight of a life wholly surrendered to Christ. Every sermon reminds me that the Holy Spirit has never belonged to one generation. Sometimes I simply close the manuscript for a moment and whisper, "Thank You, Lord." Not because I deserve this privilege. But because, somewhere along the journey, God entrusted me with something I never imagined would become part of my life. If someone had told me ten years ago that one evening I would...

As I reflect tonight after my church service at King's Runaway Bay , I find myself sitting quietly with a deep sense of gratitude. Not the loud kind of gratitude that arrives after achieving something significant. The quieter kind. The kind that slowly settles into the heart over years. The kind that makes you stop for a moment and realise that God has been shaping desires inside you long before you understood what He was doing. Sometimes I look back over my life and I struggle to recognise the road that brought me here. If someone had told the younger version of me that one day my heart would burn with a passion for restoring forgotten Christian books... That I would spend evenings studying revival history ... Searching through fragile scans that have survived more than a century... Carefully restoring sermons that many people have forgotten... I would never have believed them. And yet tonight, that is exactly where I find myself. Not because I chose this calling overnight. But be...

The Battlefield I Never Saw Coming As I finished up my week at the Gold Coast University Hospital, I found myself wrestling with a topic I have thought about for years.  I found myself opening a book that has been on my heart for far too long. Joyce Meyer's Battlefield of the Mind . I had barely worked through the first hour before I found myself closing the book several times. Not because I disagreed with anything she was saying. Quite the opposite. I kept stopping because I realised the Holy Spirit was quietly pressing on areas of my own heart that I had somehow managed to overlook. It is a strange and powerful thing when a book becomes more than words on a page. Sometimes God teaches us directly through Scripture. Sometimes He teaches us through prayer. Sometimes He teaches us through suffering. Sometimes He teaches us through ordinary conversations with people we love. And every now and then He quietly places a book into our hands at exactly the right season of life. I have a f...

I had a thought today as I walked to kings church runaway bay today and the more i refected on it the more it made sense The Deeper the Dark, the Brighter the Grace I used to think growing in Christ meant feeling less broken. Fewer cracks. Fewer relapses into the same old sin I swore off last month, last year, last decade. I thought sanctification was supposed to feel like ascension. Like each year I'd wake up a little less of a mess than the year before, until eventually I'd arrive somewhere clean. Somewhere respectable. Somewhere I could finally stop flinching when someone looked at me too closely. That is not what happened. What happened instead is this: the longer I walk with Jesus, the worse I discover I actually am. Not worse in behaviour, necessarily. Worse in diagnosis. The deeper I go, the more rot I find. And here is the strange mercy hiding inside that horror, the mercy I did not expect and did not ask for and would not have believed if you had told me ten years ag...

How close does death have to get to a man before you feel his breath? It is a question that has lived quietly inside me for a long time. It is days like today I am honestly wrestling with this question. Not because I have found an easy answer. But because I have met too many people who have carried that question without ever saying it out loud. Some battles never announce themselves. Some suffering learns to smile. Some pain becomes so practiced at hiding that even the people standing closest never notice it. Death has always fascinated humanity. Not simply because He is inevitable. But because, for some people, He does not arrive only at the end of life. Sometimes He begins walking beside them long before that. Not as a friend. Never as a friend. But as a shadow that slowly convinces a weary soul that it has always been there. He keeps pace with ordinary life. He stands quietly beside you while you make your morning coffee. He follows you through the supermarket while nobody notices t...

As I sit with my morning thoughts and coffee before I head off to my appointment at Gold Coast University Hospital I have been thinking and praying through the book of Colossians . There is a verse sitting in the middle of Colossians that I have returned to more times than I can count.Not because it is poetic, though it is. Not because it is theologically elegant, though it manages to compress an enormous claim into eleven words. But because of what it says about the nature of reality on the days when reality feels like it is actively working against you.Paul writes it almost in passing, tucked into a cascade of declarations about who Christ is and what He holds. He has just finished telling the church at Colossae that Jesus is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation, the one through whom everything was made and for whom everything exists. And then he says this: "And in him all things hold together." Colossians 1:17 . Eleven words. And if you actua...