Quiet Unfiltered Notes: From the Fire

“If you stare at the void long enough, the void stares back.” There are some sentences that stay with you. You read them once, and something inside you recognises them before your mind has even had time to explain why. That sentence has been sitting with me lately. Perhaps because I have begun to understand that there are moments in life when the darkness is not simply something we walk through. Sometimes we stare into it. Sometimes we stand at the edge of something we cannot fully explain and look down into a place that seems to have no bottom. And sometimes, if we stare long enough, the darkness seems to look back. The darkness in his own twisted way is very enticing. I have been thinking about this because someone I love is standing somewhere near that edge. My best friend. Forty years of friendship. Forty years. That is a long time to know another human being. Long enough to have watched each other become different people. Long enough to remember versions of each other that nobody...

There is a verse I have been sitting with lately. Not reading quickly. Not passing over it as one more familiar passage of Scripture. Actually sitting with it. Galatians 1:15–16 says: “But when he who had set me apart before I was born, and who called me by his grace , was pleased to reveal his Son to me…” That phrase has stopped me. I have been sitting with this verse for a week now. Was pleased to reveal His Son to me. I don't know why those particular words have landed so heavily in my heart. Perhaps because I have spent so much of my life wrestling with what it means to be loved. Not knowing whether I am loved. Knowing it intellectually. Knowing the verses. Knowing the theology. Knowing what Christianity teaches about grace. But actually feeling loved by God is sometimes an entirely different battle. There are things the mind can understand long before the heart learns how to rest inside them. I know that God loves me. I have known that for years. I have preached about it. Wr...

It has taken me a long time to realise that not every belief we carry is one we consciously choose. Some beliefs are never spoken aloud. Some are never even fully formed into words. They simply settle somewhere beneath the surface of our lives, quietly shaping the way we think, the way we grieve, the way we remember, and even the way we relate to God. We assume we are making decisions with our conscious minds. But often our deepest behaviours are being directed by convictions we never realised we held. I think I uncovered one of those hidden convictions during my shift the other night at Gold Coast University Hospital . I have spent the last week praying reflecting and thinking through this before I sat down to write this. It wasn't during a dramatic moment. There wasn't some extraordinary circumstance unfolding around me. It was simply one of those quiet spaces that sometimes appear in the middle of an ordinary shift, where the noise settles just enough for your own thoughts t...

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...