What happens when the pulpit is replaced by an ICU bed? Faith Tried by Fire tells that story through Rev Dr. Austin V. Ray. He does not recount every sermon from sixty four years. He shares the moments that taught him to praise when he could not pray.
One of those moments came in 2015 at Harborview Hospital in Seattle. Sepsis took his right leg to the edge, and doctors fought to save it. Years later, in 2022, he coded four times during another sepsis battle. Machines breathed for him while his sister’s church in Houston stepped in. Rev Dr. Alfred Davis told him, “You rest and let us do the praying.” That line changed his theology on the spot.
The book walks through the ice fall that followed. A slip left him with bilateral brain bleeds and three brain surgeries. During that same season he was receiving thirty eight rounds of radiation for prostate cancer. His wife Eunice faced her own crisis then. She had cancer surgery, a stroke in January 2024, COVID, pneumonia, sepsis, and now lives with stroke induced dementia. Austin writes about holding her hand while Psalm 31:15 steadied him: “My times are in Thy hand.”
He keeps returning to songs from an Oklahoma country church of his childhood. Negro spirituals like “Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child” became prayers when his voice failed. He ends his preface with the words “A MIGHTY FORTRESS IS OUR GOD” because that truth held when hospital walls did not. Psalm 84 appears too, with its sparrow finding a home at the altar. That picture gave him rest when treatment schedules ruled the calendar.
You will not find theories here. You find a pastor who pastored twelve churches and now pastors from a walker. If you are walking through your own long night, this book sits with you. It shows how praise can live even when answers do not. Find it on Amazon and read pages when the house is quiet.