ABOUT US • THE MISSION & THE MAN
ABOUT RUNNING TO GOD
“I told people I was going on a road trip. What I didn’t tell them was that I was running away to find out if God was actually real—and if He could love a man who still couldn't fix himself.”
MINISTRY PROFILE • AT A GLANCE
THE CREATOR & ORIGIN
Founded and authored by Brian Larwood. Born in 1965, raised in Helena Valley, now living in Swan View in the Perth Hills, Western Australia. Survivor of a catastrophic house fire on July 16, 1988.
OUR THEOLOGICAL CORE
Anchored firmly in Matthew 27 & 28 (the finished work of the Cross, the torn veil, and the Risen Christ) and Ephesians 2:4–5 (saved by unmerited grace).
OUR ETHICAL COMMITMENT
100% independent and non-commercial. No merchandise sold, no donations solicited, zero advertising, and zero user tracking. All upcoming study guides will be free.
FIELD BIOGRAPHY • UNVARNISHED MEMOIR
THE MAN BEHIND THE WHEEL • BRIAN'S STORY
Brian Larwood was born in 1965 to a young single mother who faced betrayal, harsh judgment from a church community, and was pressured into adopting out her infant son during an era of forced adoptions. For Brian, discovering his true identity became a lifelong pursuit through the silence.
Raised in the semi-rural bushland of Helena Valley in Western Australia, his adopted father was a hardworking orchardist and cattle farmer. Brian's fondest childhood memories were spent exploring the winding bends of the Helena River with his loyal dog Blue, and later riding his horse, Billy. School brought early friction—growing up in an era when left-handed children were still forced to conform—and at just four years old, upon learning he had been adopted from the hospital, he innocently reasoned: “...Oh well, my mother must be one of the nurses...”
Tragedy would strike the Larwood household early. At the age of 14, Brian lost his missionary brother Len in a tractor accident serving at Atoifi Hospital in the remote Solomon Islands. Heartbreak would follow in the years ahead: the loss of his cousin to suicide, the loss of his father to cancer of the spinal cord two years later, the passing of his beloved Uncle Henry and Aunty Ruby, and finally the loss of his adopted mother in the year 2000.
Yet God wove quiet grace through the grief. In 1997, Brian found his birth mother. For a remarkable season, he had both his adopted mother and his birth mother living under the same roof—an extraordinary story of healing, reconciliation, and second chances.
Since 2000, Brian has organized multiple volunteer trips to the Solomon Islands, coordinating a “Fly & Build” program to replace the roof of the hospital at Atoifi where his brother had served. He has shared messages from pulpits, traveled around the world—through the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Europe, Bali, and the Pacific—and developed a passion for photography and deep outback astrophotography under the crystal-clear skies of the Nullarbor.
Brian is single and lives in Swan View in Western Australia. As an independent Christian traveler, he holds firmly to the living promises of Scripture—looking with hope toward the Second Coming of Christ, resting in the restorative rhythm of the seventh-day Sabbath, and marveling at the unmerited grace that meets broken people when their own strength runs out.
LOOKING AHEAD • APRIL 2027 EXPEDITION
Brian is currently planning a new major expedition across the Nullarbor Plain for April 2027—this time setting out to explore in deeper detail the forgotten tracks, remote ruins, and sacred outback solitudes he couldn't reach on the first journey.
PERSONAL TESTIMONY • THE NIGHT EVERYTHING CHANGED
THE CRUCIBLE: JULY 16, 1988 & THE LONG GOODBYE
“The story of the survival of a house fire, the long goodbye of my dad, and a desperate prayer whispered on the floor beneath toxic black smoke.”
It began two years earlier, in 1986. That wasn't a good year. I lost my cousin to suicide—a man I had always looked up to like an older brother. His family was shattered. I was twenty-one at the time, but due to my upbringing and my adopted mother's suffocating nature, my emotional maturity had been drastically stunted. I may have been twenty-one on paper, but emotionally I felt twelve. I didn't understand how to be a mature brother to his eldest daughter, Cheryl, who was desperately trying to reach out for support. To this day, I grieve that lack of emotional understanding when she needed it most.
That same year, another event occurred on our 80-acre property in Helena Valley—an orchard and cattle property. We were shifting cattle from one paddock to another across a small road. A wayward steer that had broken in from a neighbour's property bolted into the bush. Hidden in that bush stood an old, weathered power pole, eaten through by white ants, held upright only by its guy wires. The steer ran straight into the guy wires, snapping the pole and pinning the animal to the ground.
Dad went to help the beast, attempting to lever the old timber pole to one side. But as soon as the steer felt freedom, it leaped up, throwing the heavy pole back onto my dad and breaking his leg. I had to leave him there and run for help. Dad went through complex surgeries with metal plates put into his leg, followed by prolonged rehabilitation. After that accident, he constantly complained of pain in the back of his neck. It was never investigated properly at the time. It would prove to be the silent beginning of cancer of the spinal cord.
THE MIDNIGHT INFERNO
On the 16th of July 1988, winter in Western Australia was biting cold. Dad's health had deteriorated drastically. I woke late that morning just in time to see him placed into an ambulance bound for Royal Perth Hospital. We lived in an old 1910 two-bedroom house constructed from timber, asbestos, and corrugated iron. Because the weather was freezing, the family decided to clean out decades of ash from the small handcrafted fireplace right down to the bare brick so we could light a roaring fire.
Visitors had arrived from the eastern states—my oldest sister, her husband, and my nephews. Night fell, the fire was lit, and everyone turned in. I was feeling restless and couldn't sleep properly, dozing in the office—a small room that had originally been the house's kitchen. It had an exterior door leading to the side veranda, but that door was locked and the key had broken off inside the barrel.
Around midnight, I woke to a strange roar and bright light filtering through the doorway curtain. I pulled the curtain aside and was confronted by a wall of roaring flame. The house was burning to the ground. I screamed at the top of my lungs: “FIRE! FIRE!”My mother was sleeping in the lounge with her head resting near the protruding brickwork of the fireplace; the heat had been so intense that her hair was completely blackened.
TRAPPED IN THE DARK
Everyone else managed to scramble outside, but within seconds the hallway collapsed in fire. I was trapped inside that small back room. The room was lined with varnished wood panelling and glued wallpaper; there were rubbish bags filled with blankets, plastics, and a rubber mattress. Everything was melting, incinerating, and producing thick, toxic black fumes.
Windows shattered around me from the intense heat. The smoke grew so dense it completely blotted out the light of the flames—there was only choking darkness and radiant heat. I couldn't breathe standing up. In desperation, I threw myself flat onto the floor, pressing my mouth to the floorboards where the last few centimetres of breathable air remained.
“I knew I wasn't ready to die. I knew that if that fire took me, I would face eternity unprepared. So lying there on the floor, I prayed a desperate prayer: that God would forgive me for my sins, that He would save me from that room, and that if He did, I would do whatever He wanted me to do.”
Outside on the veranda, my nephew Luther ran to the woodshed, grabbed an axe, and began hacking at the locked exterior door. Yet in the absurdity of panic, a clothesline hung right on the veranda with hanging baskets—and Luther was struggling to swing the axe properly because he didn't want to destroy the baskets! Meanwhile, the ceiling insulation above me had melted into liquid and was dripping like fire rain onto my back. I felt no physical pain; adrenaline and sheer survival had taken over.
Finally, Luther managed to chop a small opening through the timber at the very bottom of the door at ground level. Cool air rushed in. But then my mother, in her panic, was convinced I must be on fire—so she thrust a garden hose through the hole at full pressure! Instead of breathing air, I was suddenly being blasted in the face with high-pressure water, choking and spluttering:“I'm not burnt! Take it away! I can't breathe!”
Drenched, slimy with soot and water, I gripped the stubborn door lock with my fingers and pulled with everything I had left. Luther yelled, “Brian, watch your fingers or I'll chop them off!”With one final, desperate heave, the frame yielded just enough. I squeezed my body through an opening only a rabbit could get through. When my mother saw me emerge wet, blackened, and gasping for breath, she said it was like watching me literally being born again.
Adrenaline surging, I took charge: I yelled at everyone to run past the carport cars—fearing fuel tank explosions—and head up to the top orchard paddock. I told Luther to sprint to the power pole and pull the main electrical fuses so the arriving volunteer fire brigade wouldn't be electrocuted.
From that orchard paddock, we sat in the cold winter darkness and watched thirty years of home, family photo albums, videos, paintings, and memories burn to white ash. I was taken to Royal Perth Hospital and kept overnight for observation. I had escaped without massive burns, but suffered severe smoke inhalation. For three full weeks afterward, every time I breathed out, I could smell and taste the acrid odor of that fire in my lungs.
THE LONG GOODBYE • ROMANS 8:38–39
Three weeks later, in that same hospital, my dad went to his rest. In less than a month, I had lost my home, my past, and my father. Nothing would ever be the same again. Yet through the ashes of that night, one promise became the anchor of my life:
“For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”— Romans 8:38–39 (ESV)
Nothing can separate us from His love. Not grief, not loss, not human failure—not even a house fire.
01 • THE STARTING POINT
THE ESCAPE FROM SAMENESS
Surviving a night like July 16, 1988, leaves questions in your marrow that years of ordinary routine can never answer: Who am I? Why am I still here? Am I just the sum of two sets of parents—birth and adopted? And what did God actually want from me when I prayed that prayer on the floor?
Decades later in Perth, the walls of life were closing in. The same routine. The same streets. The same silent sins and guilt weighing me down. I am a struggling Christian who falters easily. The things I hated, I kept doing. Secret temptations and failures followed me everywhere, and the church world always seemed to demand a neatness I simply did not possess.
So I packed my 2012 Jeep Grand Cherokee and pointed it east towards the Nullarbor Plain. I told myself I was driving 6,859.5 kilometres to find God. But secretly, I was running away to see if I could outrun myself.
02 • THE REALITY OF THE ROAD
NO LIGHTNING BOLTS. NO MAGIC CURE.
If this were a movie, this is where I would tell you that God spoke in an audible voice over the 90 Mile Straight, that all my temptations vanished into the dust, and that I returned home a spiritually rebaptized saint.
None of that happened.
The temptations followed me into the motel rooms. The guilt rode shotgun in the passenger seat. At Port Lincoln—the turnaround point where I sat by the water hoping for some miraculous epiphany—there was only the sound of waves and my own weary thoughts. I didn't spend enough time in prayer every morning. I had awakenings, and then I slipped right back.
But standing on the cliffs of the Great Australian Bight, looking down into the endless roar of the Southern Ocean, something far deeper took root.
03 • WHAT THE DUST REVEALED
GRACE IN THE CAB OF THE JEEP
I realized that religion had lied to me. Religion tells you: “Clean yourself up, stop sinning, get your act together, and then God will walk with you.”
But the Jesus of the Bible didn't wait for anyone to get clean. He walked dusty roads with fishermen who panicked, tax collectors who cheated, and disciples who abandoned Him at the cross.
God didn't give me a magic cure on the Nullarbor because He didn't want me to trust in a road trip; He wanted me to trust in Him. He met me not at the end of my self-improvement, but at the end of my rope.
THE SCRIPTURE HEART
“But God, who is rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in trespasses, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved).”— EPHESIANS 2:4–5
This website is not a trophy of how I conquered sin.
It is an honest field record of a broken traveler who discovered that Jesus' grace doesn't quit when we falter.
“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.”— MATTHEW 11:28
You don't have to pretend you have it all together. You don't have to be fixed to start walking. If you are weary, if your past haunts you, or if you are angry at God for what didn't get stopped—welcome to the road. You're in good company.
THE REASON FOR RUNNING TO GOD
MATTHEW 27 & 28 • THE CROSS & THE RISEN CHRIST
Everything on this journey leads to the Cross where Jesus bore our punishment and tore the temple veil (Matthew 27), and the empty tomb where He conquered death and commissioned us to share His hope with all nations (Matthew 28). He is not an ancient memory—He is alive, walking with you today.
FREE BIBLE STUDIES & FIELD GUIDES • COMING SOON
We are currently authoring structured, printable Bible study guides and self-paced scripture modules based on Matthew 27 & 28 and Ephesians 2. When released, these studies will be completely free to download for personal reflection or group study.
Note: Brian Larwood is an ordinary individual sharing his personal testimony and faith. Running to God does not provide medical, psychological, or clinical healthcare services. If you require professional medical or mental health support, please consult a qualified healthcare provider or call Lifeline on 13 11 14 (Australia).
THE ROAD AWAITS
6,859.5 kilometres of dust, silence, and unvarnished grace.