In their new memoir, It's a Long Way to Florida, authors Brooke and Patricia Sadler recount how a planned 1,200-mile honeymoon road trip to St. Petersburg, Florida, turned into a 20-year, 30,000-mile missionary journey across three continents. The book, published by the authors, offers an honest and gritty look at modern missionary life, emphasizing that the greatest rewards often come from life's most inconvenient detours.
The story begins in 1957 with a lakeside wedding in Michigan and a surprise wedding gift: a brand new red Falcon intended to carry the newlyweds to their dream honeymoon. However, divine interventions quickly altered their path. Instead of heading to Florida, the Sadlers found themselves embarking on an epic adventure of faith that took them across the globe to Sri Lanka and Pakistan.
The memoir details extraordinary real-life accounts of faith in action, including how Brooke Sadler illegally smuggled truckloads of flour past five armed military checkpoints during a government-declared famine to feed starving church workers in Colombo. It also describes the profound, decades-long friendship Brooke forged with a local Buddhist High Priest, which ultimately saved their mission school's land from government seizure. Additionally, the couple opened their doors to the world's most vulnerable, nursing abandoned and malnourished infants back to health and eventually welcoming more than 80 orphaned children into their home.
"We never could have mapped out the life we lived," says co-author Brooke Sadler. "Every time we faced an impossible logistical problem or a dangerous crisis, the answer arrived in a way we never could have engineered. We wrote this book to remind readers that when God redirects your route, the detour is very often the destination."
Today, Brooke and Patricia Sadler are mostly retired and reside in Greeneville, Tennessee. True to their entrepreneurial spirit, they transformed a historic log cabin into Nolichucky Cabins, a thriving mountain retreat and glass wedding chapel where they continue to serve their community and watch their expansive, global family flourish.
It's a Long Way to Florida is available for purchase online via major book retailers. The memoir is perfect for fans of Christian memoirs, inspiring biography, and extraordinary travel narratives, offering a practical, grounded template for what it means to live by faith rather than just talk about it. It serves as a powerful reminder that the life which unfolds when you follow where you are led, rather than where you intended, can be richer and more purposeful than anything you could plan on your own.
