🏆 Dual-Category Award Winner
Best Survivor Story & Best Inspirational Book of the Year.
Honoring Gary McDougall
There are stories that inspire—and then there are stories that leave you silent, humbled, and changed. Gary McDougall’s story is the latter.
I have never, in my life, read a journey like this.
Gary was not meant to survive once—yet he survived again and again, pulled back from death time after time. From childhood onward, his life reads like a series of moments where breath itself seemed borrowed. And still, with the help of God, he is here—so that he can tell the story he was spared to tell.
One of his earliest brushes with death came when he was just a little boy, trapped in the terror of a deadly hurricane. As floodwaters rose higher and higher, his mother made an impossible choice to save her children—tying them to land poles so they would not be swept away. In that moment, survival was not theory or faith-by-phrase; it was faith by action. And Gary lived. When you read that chapter, it is impossible not to ask yourself—how could anyone say there is no God?
But the trials did not end there.
Gary later recounts moving to New York, where another brush with death awaited—nearly drowning while swimming the Hudson River with a friend. That near loss joins a staggering list of escapes that would leave most people broken: surviving a deadly hurricane as a child, enduring physical abuse, sexual abuse, poverty, racism, emotional trauma, despair, and the heavy burden of survivor’s guilt after escaping death nine times.
This is not a story polished for comfort. It is a spiritual memoir of a man who lost his faith—and then found it again, deeper and truer than before. Gary writes with honesty about the darkness, including how close he came to ending his life, and how God reached into that abyss and pulled him back. Not with condemnation, but with purpose.
And purpose is where this story lands.
Because the same boy who was tied to poles to survive a storm, the same man who escaped death repeatedly, now stands as a testament to redemption and resilience. Today, Gary McDougall serves as an independent contractor and Lead Engineer for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)—a living reminder that where you begin does not determine where you are called to go.
His life answers a powerful question: Why was I saved?
The answer is clear—so others might believe survival is possible, healing is real, and God does not abandon His children, even in the fiercest storms.
This is why Gary McDougall is the Dual-Category Award Winner for Best Survivor Story and Best Inspirational Book of the Year.
Because his story captures the very journey of survival—again and again.
Because it offers hope to those who feel marked by trauma.
Because it proves that faith can be lost, questioned, and still found again.
And because it shows, unmistakably, that God is with us—when we need Him most.
Gary’s story does not merely inspire—it testifies. It tells readers that no matter how many times you’ve fallen, how many storms you’ve endured, or how close the darkness has come, your life can still carry meaning, purpose, and light.
Gary McDougall survived so that others might live with hope.
And that is why this honor is not only deserved—it is sacred.
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