Surrendered

What happens when an ordinary person says yes to God?

Stephen P. Sullivan wasn't a pastor. He wasn't a missionary. He was a government IT worker from North Augusta, South Carolina, who sat in the back of a church one Sunday night, heard a stranger give a testimony about a mission trip to Africa, and knew-not hoped, not wondered-knew that he was going too.

He had no ministry training. No idea how the money would come. No experience with international travel. He had never even been on an airplane.

What followed were two mission trips to southern Africa - Zimbabwe in 2000 and Cape Town in 2001-and a lifetime of ministry that never really ended when the plane came home.

Surrendered: What God Did When I Said Yes is the true story of what God can do with one ordinary life when that life is fully given over to Him. It is a story of provision-watching the money arrive, deadline by deadline, in ways no human being orchestrated. It is a story of faith tested in unfamiliar places-passports confiscated at a border crossing, a tape recorder that wouldn't work minutes before Stephen was supposed to sing, a witch doctor standing in the road facing the direction of the church where they had just ministered.

And it is a story of the moments that don't make the highlight reel but stay with you forever. Two little girls in South Africa who reacted to two pieces of caramel candy like they had been handed gold. A man in a mountain village who couldn't read a word of English but held a paperback Bible tight to his chest like something he had been waiting for his whole life. A woman in a scrap-metal kitchen wearing a golden yellow beret with a joy that had nothing to do with what she owned.

Africa changed Stephen Sullivan. But the change didn't stop when he landed back in Atlanta. It followed him home, into a church gym on Wednesday nights, into a car ride with a Zimbabwean pastor named Brother Agrippa, into twenty-plus years of student ministry that he never saw coming.

Surrendered is for anyone who has ever felt God nudging them toward something they didn't feel ready for. Anyone who has wondered whether their ordinary life - their ordinary job, their ordinary skills, their ordinary story - could be used for something that actually matters.

It can. This book is proof.