At the entrance of City Florist in Liberty, a sign greets customers with a simple but powerful message: “Don’t be ashamed of your story. It will inspire others.” For owners Rev. Jamie and Stephanie Blume, those words now carry a deeply personal meaning.
Six weeks ago, at their home in Hardin, Texas, Rev. Blume, pastor of The Family Church, survived a life-changing accident that left him with severe burns. He hopes that by sharing his experience, others will see how prayer, faith, and God’s grace can carry someone through even the darkest days.
The day that changed everything
In June 2025, Jamie was tending to a debris burn on his property. The family had recently cut down trees in their yard, and the limbs had been piled up for disposal.
“I told the guys just to leave the limbs,” he recalled. “They had piled a bunch of them on our burn pile, and I wanted to burn them.”
Intending to use diesel to ignite the brush, Jamie grabbed a container and poured the liquid onto the pile. But in a split second, everything went wrong.
The container did not hold diesel. It was gasoline.
The moment the fire erupted, Jamie knew he had made a grave error. Neighbors later reported hearing what they described as an explosion that rattled windows and doors.
One of those neighbors, Hardin Fire Chief Nic Nelson, lives nearby. When he heard the blast, he immediately drove toward the source, the Blumes say.
Meanwhile, inside the house, Stephanie was sitting in a chair when she felt the shockwave.
“I heard something. It shook the house, and I thought, ‘What in the world was that?’ I had no idea what had happened at first,” she said. “I got up and walked outside and saw him crawling, trying to get up from the ground. Smoke was coming from him. He was all black.”
Critical first moments
Jamie remembers looking down to check if his shirt was still on fire after smelling something burning.
With badly wounded hands and arms, he patted out embers on his shirt and smothered flames in his hair.
Knowing every second counted, the couple didn’t wait for an ambulance. They got into their car and drove straight to Liberty-Dayton Regional Medical Center, where emergency room staff quickly began treating his burns.
“They were fantastic,” Jamie said.
From there, he was transported to the University of Texas Medical Branch burn center in Galveston — the start of a long and difficult recovery.
A fight for life
“Our family was told that we need to be prepared for him to die as most people with severe burns die,” Stephanie said.
Jamie added, “It was a scary thing to say. It’s because it can get into your mouth, throat and lungs. Thankfully my mouth was shut at that exact moment. I thank the Lord for that. I’ve got a message that I am going to teach about how the power of life and death are in the tongue. God shut my mouth, literally.”
He resisted doctors’ plans to intubate him, believing that losing the ability to talk would cause him more harm because he needed to be able to speak through the situation — even to himself. Despite the severity of his burns, he says he never felt he was going to die.
His wife described the entire ordeal, including his recovery, as “a God thing.”
The power of prayer
It was the prayers he felt from friends and loved ones, along with his belief in God, that kept him moving forward through immense pain. The dead skin had to be sloughed off multiple times a day to prevent infection — a process as grueling as it sounds.
One of the most painful tasks was shaving his face every day.
“They said that was the greatest chance of infection — from hair growing through the wounded skin,” he explained.
After a week in the hospital, he felt like he had turned a corner.
“The first week was pretty tough. He had to sleep with his arms propped up on pillows, sleeping in a chair straight up,” Stephanie said.
“I wasn’t getting a lot of sleep,” Jamie added, explaining that he avoided pain medication because it isn’t terribly effective in burn cases.
His three daughters — Amanda, Chelsea, and Zyla — each stepped up to help, but the hardest job fell to Chelsea.
“All the girls were great, but Chelsea was the one who helped me scrape off the dead skin,” Jamie said. “She did the doctoring for the bulk of it after we got home. I had wraps on for six days that went all the way down my arms. My hands were balled up in fists when the fire happened, so the insides of my hands were hardly burned. It was the knuckles up that got everything.”
His ears and neck were also severely burned.
Leaning on the Lord
Throughout his recovery, Jamie kept his mind and spirit occupied by praying, playing worship videos on YouTube, and listening to the Bible being read to him at night.
When asked if that helped, he replied, “Oh, yeah, it’s peace, you know. The Word is rest.”
Looking back on the fire now, he says he is thankful for the “God moments” — the one that shut his mouth at just the right time, the one that brought his wife and first responders to him almost instantly, the exceptional care at Liberty-Dayton Regional Medical Center and UTMB-Galveston, but most of all, that his grandsons weren’t with him when it happened.
As they are usually by his side, he teared up at the thought that they might have been hurt that day.
The burns might leave scars, but for Jamie they are reminders — not of the pain, but of the miracles that happened along the way.
“For years, I have had a regimen where I fast, and I had said that I feel bad about it sometimes because it’s become routine. Sometimes I feel like it’s not a sacrifice any longer because it has become routine,” he said. “But I think that what I have learned the most is even when it seems living for God is routine, it still matters. God’s been really, really good to me through this.”
And in keeping with the message at City Florist, Jamie is using his story as a testimony — a reminder that even in the fire, God’s goodness can still be seen.
That was a mistake going to liberty Dayton hospital