From Suicidal Teen to Man of Faith: The Story of Tom Snow

SPEAKER_02 0:00

The big part is getting to know the peace, the love, and the joy of the Holy Spirit, the Father, and the Son in us. And when you know that, then you can walk through any trauma. Does it make the traumas go away? No, I was still dying. I was dying for months after that until God took it away. But that didn't matter. We have mental trauma. Yes. I had a lot of hatred and anger at myself and at my father, no longer at God. I still had the guilt and the, you know, horrible that I had to, you know, grief I had towards my mother, for my mother. That had that got dealt with later. But in the moment, the presence of the Lord became the most important focus of my life because from that moment on I found out you can walk through hell and back.

SPEAKER_00 0:50

A father is often expected to be the strong one to hold his family together, to keep moving forward, even when part of his world has fallen apart. After losing his daughter Jessica to cancer, James Moffat discovered how few places existed for grieving fathers, and how many men were carrying their pain in silence. The Father's Refuge podcast was created to give those fathers a place to be seen, heard, and reminded that they don't have to walk through grief alone. Through honest conversations, personal stories, and faith-rooted encouragement, James explores the realities of loss, trauma, emotional healing, and rebuilding life after the unimaginable. Grief may change a father forever, but it doesn't have to destroy his faith or take away his hope. This is the Father's Refuge Podcast, a place for grieving fathers to find understanding, healing, and refuge.

SPEAKER_01 1:58

Hello and welcome to the Father's Refuge Podcast. My name is James Moffat, and I'll be your host. Today I'm joined by an author, spiritual mentor, Tom Snow. Tom, how are you doing today?

SPEAKER_02 2:08

Doing all right. Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_01 2:10

Tom has walked through deep loss, trauma, and seasons of suffering, and in this conversation we explore how grief reshapes a man's faith and identity. If you're carrying pain, new or old, I believe you'll find hope here. Tom, kind of uh introduce yourself to the listening audience. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 2:27

Well, I've been walking with the Lord for about 56 years. He graciously uh saved me at 16 when I was dying of cancer and miraculously healed me. Long story, won't go into all that unless you ask. But I've gone through not only physical trials and trauma, but I grew up in the charismatic move. I saw the power of God and saw how men took over the movement that was sovereign by God and actually destroyed it, at which point I even though I love all the things God did, I quit being a charismatic and simply am a Christian. I'm not part of denominations or religions. I simply am a Christian who walks with the Lord. And for 56 years, that's what I've been doing. I went through a first marriage, even though she was a Christian woman. She was very troubled, very bipolar, extremely bipolar. And that marriage ended. I have four good kids from that marriage. I now have a second wife, been with her 21 years. We have a 13-year-old daughter who is just the joy of my life. And my wife and I and daughter have a wonderful life together. Juliet wants to introduce herself.

SPEAKER_01 3:38

Hello.

SPEAKER_02 3:39

So uh hello. Bye-bye. So she loves when her daddy talks good about her, but I always almost always do, unless we have to get talk about homework. But anyway.

SPEAKER_01 3:48

Is that your daughter?

SPEAKER_02 3:49

Yeah. Mm-hmm. Okay. That was my 13-year-old daughter. So uh anyway, I ran a software business for 45 years. I worked for a large uh company. I went to school, became a hardware and software engineer in computers, ran my own software development company for 45 years. I'm now retired from that, and I'm now doing a healthy foods company that's after having congestive heart failure three years ago, was a wake-up call to uh eat right. Thought I was eating right, but uh I now develop products that are great tasting, but 100% sugar free, 100% salt free. And, you know, that's my new business. I'm was in secondary leadership in ministry for years. I'm like Paul. I believe in being a tent maker. I've never taken money for ministry, don't do that. I've written three books. I sell them, but I also give them away. I'm not here to make a few bucks on books. And so, you know, I'm I'm here hoping to share what I've learned in 56 years to help equip the body, to help other people get through some of the trauma, the pain, you know, whether it's physical pain, mental emotional pain, church abuse, leadership abuse, all kinds of pain that I've gone through that many other people have gone through.

SPEAKER_01 5:05

You've certainly experienced uh grief and loss in your life, and you have a an amazing story to tell. Can we go back to when you were how old were you when you were diagnosed with cancer?

SPEAKER_02 5:16

I was fifteen. My mother had just died of cancer, and uh she had liver cancer, and one month after she died, I noticed a rock hard tumor in my abdomen about the size of a walnut. And I knew because I knew because I knew I wasn't a Christian yet. I had grown up in religianity, you know, churchianity, different denominations, but I didn't know the gospel, hadn't met the Lord. And uh my mother was a believer, come from a Jewish heritage on both sides of the lineage, but she had met the Lord and she wasn't afraid of dying. And so that's when I found out I carried a lot of guilt with that because uh God had graced me with good intelligence, maybe even great intelligence as a young man, and I had created an invention back in the 60s to collect asbestos dust off of brakes uh around the wheels of cars, because I was in a high school and did studies and we didn't have the internet. We actually had to use books, we had to go to the library. But I had seen that there was sixty million tons of brake dust coming off of cars around the world every year, and they're made of asbestos, and why people were scientists, we were learning in science how dangerous asbestos was. So I wanted to create an invention, but uh it that is one of the factors that I think affected my mother and me both with getting cancer.

SPEAKER_01 6:38

My father he spent twenty-six years in the army as a drill sergeant, and then retired and went to Terrell State Hospital and was their T V man, and apparently he crawled around in in attics where they had the uh insulation, which is partly asbestos, and back then they didn't know how dangerous it was. Well, anyway, he got got lung cancer or i.e. uh asbestos poisoning and that eventually killed him in 1990. So going back to your your diagnosis and you're fifteen and you just experienced your mother losing her life uh from cancer. How did did that do you think that brought you closer to the Lord or did it motivate you to seek out spiritual guidance or or uh hope for the future?

SPEAKER_02 7:26

Well it's a good question. Once you gotta go back to I was raised in denominational churches. Eve at that age I didn't even know my Jewish lineage. My parents had hidden it because of the persecution in the family, so I found that out later. I was raised in denominational churches that didn't preach the gospel, didn't understand how to meet the Lord, so I just believed God was there, big, way up somewhere in the universe, in charge of everything. So I believed in him, but I didn't know how to meet him. And now I just watched my mother die. She wasn't afraid of death, which kind of bothered me too, that she wasn't. I mean, I was glad, but it was like I would have been scared. Now I am scared, because now I'm facing eternity and not knowing where I'm going. And I have the guilt of the world that my experiments trying to be big in my school and win state science fair, which I did, and create an invention that was patentable, which it was, all of a sudden meant nothing. And because my experiments had just killed her and was working and killing me. So at this point, yes, I wanted to know where I'm going for eternity, but the guilt I had said I don't deserve it. I don't deserve to go to heaven. I don't deserve, but at the same time, I was facing eternity and I was scared. So yeah, it it makes you have that time where all of a sudden everything else pales because the most important subjects are right there in front of your life. I hear that none of us get out of this alive. That's what I hear too.

SPEAKER_01 8:57

I have I turned 65 this year, and uh, of course I'm a baby boomer, and the older I get, the more I think about my mortality, the more I think about the hoping of Jesus and the hope in Jesus. And we've we lost two children to one to cancer and one to other complications. And um, of course we've all of us lose our parents and grandparents at some point the older you get. And so I have I have found myself doing some introspection uh as I get older, right? And sorry to hear about your children.

SPEAKER_02 9:30

Like you say, parents parents you expect, and we always want to outlast our children. Sure. It's terrible when a child goes before us.

SPEAKER_01 9:36

Yeah, I think that's the normal the way that typically the the children do outlive you. But unfortunately, some of us come face to face with loss and grief and all of that. I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy. Not that I have a worst enemy, but I I would not wish wish that on anybody. I hear you. So let me ask you this. Was there a moment in your grief when you felt completely alone or misunderstood? What did that experience teach you?

SPEAKER_02 10:02

Well, I was always a loner. I really didn't fit in with my peers. I was raised to to have my father's attention, who was a double major engineer. I had to just sit at the kitchen table and learn science and math from being knee-high to a grasshopper. By the time I was in sixth grade, I knew trigonometry and would embarrass my teachers on purpose, out of ego. Yeah, the way you please your father, he doesn't play ball with you, he doesn't take you fishing. And so my two older brothers wouldn't get his attention. My two older b I'd ace anything I wanted, I had a photographic memory. Now I'm glad if I have a memory. But when I was young, I had a photographic memory and I could ace anything. And my father, that's how I got his attention. And my two older brothers would didn't like me because he always compared them to me, me to them. And so I was a loner. I mean, I didn't raise with my peers, you know. I my peers at school were the brainiacs, and even they didn't fit the constraints that I where I live. So I was pretty much a loner. But now when you're facing death, now you're really alone because I never had anybody and now I have nobody. And the only love of my life was my mother, and she had just passed. And so it grips you very deeply. I was already at the bottom of not having anyone to reach out with, reach to. And when I noticed the rock hard tumor in my gut, I wouldn't tell anybody about it. I wasn't going to seek medical help. I felt like I deserved to die. The grief, the guilt of what I brought upon my mother and myself by maybe trying to do a good thing, but my ego was too big, and I didn't have perfect environments, and I'm playing with a lot of asbestos dust. And it was a factor, one of the factors that killed my mother, and a factor that had me with my disease. So I felt very alone, very isolated, carrying the burden of my mother, carrying the grief, carrying the guilt, now facing eternity and not knowing, am I gonna get to go to heaven? I sure know I didn't deserve it. Now we as cre we as Christians know better, you can't earn your way to heaven. It's a personal relationship with the true and living God who comes to live in us. It's not based on us being good enough ever. So none of us can be good enough. There's no religianity or fake spirituality that works. And so I was facing this alone, and I actually started having daily visions. I wasn't a Christian. Christians can have visions, but I would literally see a series. Anytime I'd close my eyes, I could see a series of cloud puffs going across the horizon from one end to the other, just a single line of cloud puffs. And on top of each puff was a scene in time. And I'd watch from one end of the horizon to the other, and when the cloud puffs would cut float by and come overhead, I'd look at the scene in life, and it was a scene in life going on without me. And it struck me two ways. One, eternity was true and it was gonna happen. And two, life wasn't gonna stop when Tom died. Life was going on without me. So it scared me. And it it's like I wanted to find out how how do I get that assurance that my mother had that she knew she was solid with the Lord. She was not afraid to die. I was very afraid. And at the end of four months of this isolation, I'm not telling anybody anything about this. And you asked about a diagnosis. I didn't actually have a doctor diagnose it. Okay. It was simply a tumor growing in my gut. Started out the size of a walnut, hard as a rock. By five, six months later, it was the size of a football hard or no, a softball hard as a rock. At the end of 18 months, it was the size of a football, hard as a rock. And so I I didn't want to tell anybody though. It's like as Christians, we can know because we know because we know because of the Holy Spirit confirming in us. But I knew it, but I didn't know why I knew it. I just knew I knew it. Well, I had a praying mother who had prayed for her boys, and I thank God honored all of her prayers. And so at the end of four months watching this eternal progression of clouds, every time I close my eyes, and I wouldn't asleep, it'd be the middle of the day. Just got home from high school, sitting in in my family room alone, father working and my two older brothers gone, college and military. And one day sitting in that family room, middle of the afternoon, and I heard the audible voice of God. First and only time I've ever heard the audible. We as believers can hear the still small quiet voice of God anytime. If we're he's more willing to talk to us than we are him. We just have to learn how to hear him and sort it through. But in this moment, I heard Audible. And when he spoke, because here I was watching this progression of clouds, fearing my imminent doom, which was seeming very near, and when he spoke, the room sounded like a roaring freight train going through the room. It was so loud. It sounded like roaring thunder filling just the room that I'm in. But it was so full of love, unmistakable love, something the enemy can't do. The enemy can put on a show, and the God of this world can put on dog and pony shows and scare the day daylights out of people. But this he imitate God's love, peace, or joy. And the room was full of love beyond anything I've ever felt before or after. And the Lord spoke to me and he said two things. He said, I love you, and someday I'll provide you a perfect mate for you. The I love you made total sense. I was surrounded by love. This I'll give you your perfect mate made no sense because hey, I'm doomed to die. I'm I'm shortly to be buried six feet under. I'm thinking, and in the few moments that the presence of God was there, probably like Moses in the burning bush, it was there for precious moments and then it was gone. And I set the second part aside. Someday I'll provide your perfect mate for you, because that's like, God, I know you're the God of the universe, and you probably didn't get the memo from the angels. I'm doomed to be six feet under real soon. So, you know, that's how I compartmentalized it. I didn't know the scripture that says he has every hair counted on our heads. And so, you know, I didn't know he knew us that intimately, more intimately than we know ourselves, and that the God of the universe has every one of our hairs counted. I have a lot less now, but most people start with 40,000, 50,000, you know, hairs on your head and he has everyone numbered? Let the let that fathom in your mind. Fathom that it's a little bit beyond the the understanding. And so that had became the point where now I wanted to find out how to meet the true and living God before I kicked it, before I was buried six feet under.

SPEAKER_01 16:47

So what emotions were the hardest for you to admit during your seasons of loss? Anger, fear, regret, disappointment, or something else?

SPEAKER_02 16:55

I was full of grief f and guilt about my mother. I hated myself, so I had a lot of hate and anger at myself for being what I thought was the cause of her death. And so I had a very deep hatred and anger at myself. But then that grew even worse with anger and hate and unforgiveness because the good news is about a month after the Lord spoke to me, my brother Bruce, who was in college, uh, now it's 1970, I'm now 16, and he comes home to tell my father and I that he had just come, his friends had talked him into taking LSD. And when he was on that trip, he called out on the Lord. He had knew he had been around some friends that took him to churches, he knew the gospel. He asked the Lord to come into his life to save him. The Lord took him down off that trip, instantly sobered him. He came home to tell us that news. Well, that's not a joke in 1970 in an upper middle class family. My father disciplined with the belt and the fist, and he would have literally beat my brother within an inch of his life if he knew he was on drugs of any kind. Marijuana would have been bad enough. But LSD wasn't a joking matter. So I know Bruce was telling the truth. And I asked the Lord or I asked him, you know, how do you meet the Lord? He told me the scriptures, told me I needed to repent and to ask the Lord to come into my life. I did that for a day and a half, constantly over and over. I didn't feel anything. Bruce got the star-spangled banner when he met the Lord, and I got goose eggs. Now, maybe it's because my whole soul was so full of hate, anger, guilt. When the Lord comes into our lives, he comes into our innermost being our spirit, and that's deeper than our body or our soul. It's the innermost being. We don't live out of that. We don't know. The day before we asked the Lord in, we didn't know we were dead in the spirit. The day after we he at we ask him to come in, we may not know either, because unless it leaks into our soul, we don't get the feeling. The feeling is in the heart, the mind, the feelings, our our whole soul. And so when shortly after that, and so at this point, I'm now starting to get mad that at God, the devil's whispering right here and going, So you think a month ago you really heard God? It's like talking to Eve, you know, the devil on one shoulder and the angel on another, the old picture of that. Right. A little more truth than fiction, and the devil's always whispering in our ear, the God of this world, and he's going, just like to Eve, did God really say you shouldn't eat of the tree? Do you do you think maybe it's because he's afraid you'll get the knowledge of good and evil? And so the devil's whispering, we're we've been trained by the God of this world from the day we were born. It's called the old nature, called the old self, the flesh. And that training, we're like mice that run a maze. He rings a bell, we'll do this. He rings a buzzer, we'll do something else. He puts a piece of cheese out, we'll do as predicted. He's trained us. So all it takes is him whispering in our ear, and we immediately jump and we'll take right on over. So the devil whispers and says, You know what? Do you really think that was God who spoke to you? I'll bet you you probably just fell asleep watching that vision thing. And you know what? You probably had a dream. It probably really wasn't God. God probably isn't really real like you think. He's way far away. He doesn't care what your brother told you. Your brother's a screw up. He just did LSD, you know, because God didn't come in into your life, did he? So now I'm getting I'm buying into the baloney in my in my uh household with my 13-year-old, we call BS baloney sandwich. So, you know, it was a lot of baloney sandwiching going on and a lot of BSing. And I listened and I bought into it like we like most of us do. And now I'm starting to get angry at God because here I thought maybe I was gonna have a way out of this off this earth, and now that looks like that's gone. Shortly after that, my father found out about the cancer. This is now six or seven months past me knowing, and there's a whole story with that. I won't go into it. And when he finds out, I knew he was gonna how he was gonna find out, and I'm like, I didn't uh I was thinking, well, when he finds out, maybe he'll be able to figuratively, you know, reach out, put his arm around me. He was not he didn't show emotion, didn't show love. He was very left brain, very engineer, that's it. And so and maybe just normal father of 1970. But I'm thinking, well, yeah, you can figuratively reach out. He could seek medical help. I don't care, I don't want it. Because I feel like I deserve to die. That's my my penance. And uh instead, he found out, he didn't tell me. I knew when he found out and how he found out, and instead, a week later, he took out a multi-million dollar life insurance policy on me. That PO'd me off beyond belief. I bet. I can only imagine. It's like, are you really? I I can't I don't want to hurt anybody's feelings here, but are you how can I say it? Eff and kidding me. Are you kidding me for what you are you? I'm your favorite son, your protege, and all All you can do is take money out, get a policy so you can retire on me? I understand. I'm logically thinking you going through the loss of your wife, my mother from seven months ago, I understand that. Now you found out your protege is gonna die, your youngest son. But are you kidding me? Is that your response? Get take out money and retire on me? Oh, now my anger and hate is at him. Deep unforgiveness. So those are just a few of the emotions wrapped into the situation.

SPEAKER_01 22:28

I don't want to assume, but I'm assuming that your your father was not a believer.

SPEAKER_02 22:34

It's a really long story. He was he had met the Lord when he was 12 years old. Now, this is a long story. I won't go into it in any depth. There's a long history of persecution, and his parents came from Europe from heavy persecution, killing of family members. Just a tremendous, horrible story. And so he was raised as a Jew at 12 years old in New York. He and some of his little Jewish buddies went to a Billy Sunday crusade, 1920. Uh, not Billy Graham, Billy Sunday. And they went to this tent meeting to get in the back and mock the Christians. And when he was in the back back there, God touched him and he went forward and he met the Lord. So his plan backfired. So now he's all happy. He comes home, 12-year-old boy, tells his father, Joseph, my grandfather, and grandma Sadie, about this wonderful news. And they came from Europe with a long line of persecution and death from Christians. So my grandfather beat my father within an inch of his life. And so at that point, my father said, Now I'm a nothing. And it wasn't until many years later, and many and was even years after my conversion before he gave his life back to the Lord. That's a long story, as short as I can make it.

SPEAKER_01 23:53

I understand. So Father's Refuge Podcast is a platform where people that are experiencing loss and grief, whether it be the loss of a child to cancer or a loved one, husband, wife, grandparent, whatever, it loss and grief can be many things. You can you can lose a career, and we all we all have a story and we all experience loss and grief in our own ways at different times in our life. But my hope and vision for the podcast is for for people that are listening to the stories of people like yourself. They're looking for they're looking for a path forward. They're looking for maybe even some of them are not even looking for a path forward. Maybe some of them that that the emotions are so raw that all they want to do is just curl up on the couch and put a blanket over their head and don't want to face the day or don't think that there is a future. Because as you know, the losing a loved one to cancer or to a horrible car accident or whatever, i it's a pretty, pretty tough thing. And so I bring people onto the podcast to tell their individual stories and to talk about the fact that there is hope and talk about that their their journey through loss and grief and how it affected them in the beginning and how you learned how to to get beyond that, to get past that. And uh I would say that as a believer that you have a path forward and that that the Lord can provide you with the hope and the the healing internally, emotionally, mentally, that we desperately need. And so I would like to spend a couple of moments for you telling our audience your your path forward and how it how it helped to bring healing into your life. Sure.

SPEAKER_02 25:40

Well, to to know how my life changed, you know, it's I had met the Lord, I but I didn't know that he actually, you know, I asked him to come in, but I had no feelings of that. And like you said, when we're dealing with grief and pain and emotions and hatred and anger and all these things going on, some people want to curl up on under the blanket. Some of us will lash out and because we all feel out of control and we want to get some kind of control back. And so I, my effort to get control, you know, the devil once again still whispering in my ear, says, you know what? After father takes out this life insurance policy, it's time to go haywire. And I was had a plan. I was 16, but I built up a Harley Chopper, became a scuzz ball, went from a brainiac to a long-haired, scuzzy person you wouldn't wish on your worst enemy. You'd really have to hate them. And uh, and I began to ride with the Hell's Angels. I became the second biggest drinker at my school at 16. Drink a fifth whiskey in two hours, and proud of it, that I would drive home on my motorcycle and make it home. What I didn't tell anybody back then was I'd be on a four-lane road heading home, starting on the outermost right lane, wake up, and I'm in the most left side, ready to go in the ditch, to all of a sudden literally get shoved back across the road and be driving down the road, wake up. I was on the other side, ready to go in the ditch, shoved back. There's a lot of badly bruised angels that uh were protecting in that day. Had a praying mother. And so, but I didn't understand the grace of God in that moment, and I'm just going berserk. And the devil's like, go crazy, you're dying, it's getting worse, you don't have much time left, do everything, go crazy. So I was. And I was building up my chopper with a plan in mind to drive it. I was gonna tell my, I was gonna blackmail my father and tell him, I know about your insurance fraud, give me so many thousands of dollars, I'm gonna drive across country. When and later you can come pick up the pieces and cash in. But my plan included something a little more devious, which was when you feel out of control, I planned my suicide. I was going to go drive to the Grand Canyon from Ohio at that point where I lived and stop before I got to California, go to the Grand Canyon and drive my motorcycle off. I was gonna pull an evil canival without trying to reach the other side. And I was good, that way I'd have control of me dying. Because everything's out of control, right? And when you're feeling all this grief, you want control. So that was my plan. I also planned to pin a letter inside my clothes so that when they picked up the pieces at the bottom, it would tell about my father's insurance fraud. He'd lose the payout, he'd lose the money he gave me, and I hoped he'd go to jail. That's how much anger I had. That's more of that control. You want people to have payback. So all this terrible stuff is raging inside of me. But having that intelligence, being a planner, I also knew I had to have that motorcycle running good enough, and it never would. It's like you get to the edge of town, and it's like Balaam with the angel with the sword, and he was standing there and he would just touch the engine and it'd break again. And I was rebuilding that engine all the time. And so after eight months of this craziness, I was sitting around on my motorcycle one night, drinking with my uh with the Hales Angels biker buddy gang, just drinking bottle after bottle of cheap wine, late at night, getting drunk like normal. And so we had a discussion. Discussions were normal. We would talk about things, anything. But this night it was a spiritual discussion, and that's not normal. And so, I mean, these are rough, tough Hells Angels, 1970, 71. And so, you know, I'm like, uh, you know what? I'm gonna tell them about what happened to Bruce and what happened to him and his LSD trip and how God saved him and brought him down and blah, blah, blah. And I know when I tell them that, they're gonna mock and scoff, and I'm gonna enjoy that they mock and scoff, because I'm gonna mock and scoff with them. That's my anger, right? And our grief. And so I told them and they listened intently and they didn't mock. And that kind of PO'd me off again. So now I was like, okay, now I'm gonna tell my story that I supposedly heard from God. God spoke to me and all these things, and I asked the Lord to come to my life and he didn't come in. And I said, and I'm thinking, if I tell them that story, they'll really mock, and I'm gonna enjoy them mocking. And I told them the story, and they didn't mock. That didn't I didn't like that. But in the moment I told the story and I said, and when I asked the Lord to come into my life, he he didn't. In that moment, I knew I was wrong. And the Holy Spirit, who had been in my deepest, most innermost being, as promised by the scripture, from that moment he broke forth into my soul. My soul that was so full of hatred and anger and guilt and grief and hate myself and hate God and hate my father. And he broke through that garbage. And all of a sudden I felt the presence of God, the same presence when he had filled my that family room with his love. And all of a sudden I was sobered. And all of a sudden I knew I was wrong in what I was saying. And all of a sudden, I was glad I was wrong. I was glad I was wrong. And I was sobered. And I all of a sudden look around like, what am I doing here? What am I doing here with, you know, I'm a scuzz ball. What am I doing with all these scuzz balls? And I said, I gotta go. And I drove home sober that night. Angels didn't have to shove me back and forth. The next morning, the whole Grand Canyon plan was off because now I knew what my mother knew. I knew where I was going. Sure, I still had cancer. I had a tumor that had grown larger than a football, hard as a rock in my gut. I knew I was dying. That's a given. That's pff that's not the problem. But now I knew where I was going and I was no longer afraid. And I knew why she wasn't afraid, and my life was full of joy. And when that happens, that changes your life. It doesn't matter if you get the physical healing or not. Yeah, that happened a little later, and that's another story. And when God did it, it was done in 24 hours. That's not that's not the big part of the testimony here. The big part is getting to know the peace, the love, and the joy of the Holy Spirit, the Father, and the Son in us. And when you know that, then you can walk through any trauma. Does it make the traumas go away? No, I was still dying. I was dying for months after that until God took it away. But that didn't matter. We have mental trauma. Yes. I had a lot of hatred and anger at myself and at my father, no longer at God. I still had the guilt and the horrible that I had grief I had towards my mother, for my mother. That had that got dealt with later. But in the moment, the presence of the Lord became the most important focus of my life because from that moment on, I found out you can walk through hell and back. Life is was never promised to be easy. Anybody who tells you life is just gonna be a bowl of cherries. If you just have faith, you can claim anything you want and God'll do it. They're full of baloney, they're full of BS. Study the scriptures. I study many, started at that point studying many different versions, studied the Greek and the Hebrew, like Paul. You don't believe you can listen to every teacher-preacher podcast out there, but don't take it as your own. Paul commended the Bereans. Study. They didn't listen to Paul, didn't take his word verbatim, and they went back and studied this the scriptures. They went back and studied the original text, see if he was right. And he commended them, and he's quote unquote the greatest preacher of the day, right? And he loved it. Because we're not supposed to worship men. Men don't, you know, God can use men and women, but that doesn't make and God can use them as mouthpiece. That does not make them right or always right. Or even we don't know what percentage right. Not the point. We can learn, we study, we study on our own. And so when you know, when you have that becomes the foundation of your life is walking with the true and living God, then all else doesn't matter. If you're wanting rainbows and puppy dogs, and you believe the bill of goods that that's what Christians are supposed to get, I've got bad news for you. Life is full of trauma, it's gonna be hard. But if you have the peace of God, Philippians 4 7, the peace, not a peace, gotta learn the difference. When you have the peace of God that passes comprehension and understanding, guarding our hearts and our minds, acting as umpire in our hearts and our minds. When we have that, we can walk through the difficult things of life. Life was never promised to be easy. This is a hundred-year testing ground. That's what this life is for each of us. And some of us, looked for me, it was almost only 16 years. So it's a hundred-year testing ground. And in that testing ground, what are we going to do? Are we going to learn to walk with the true and living God through the midst of all the trouble and have his peace, his love, his joy? Or are we going to try to gut it out ourselves? Try gutting it out. I guarantee it doesn't work well.

SPEAKER_01 34:52

Well, thank you for sharing your restoration story with us. And I would agree with much of what you said. And I always encourage people that are listening to exercise self-care, but they don't have to be in pain and they don't have to be alone the entire time, but there's there's help and there's hope out there. And obviously, Jesus is is the number one solution for all of our problems. And it's like you said, if somebody tells you, oh, all you have to do is become a Christian, and then there'll be no more trials or tribulations in your life and everything will be perfect. Well, they're just selling you a bill of goods because that's like you said, it's a baloney sandwich. We were never promised a tomorrow. And and Jesus said there's going to be trials and tribulations. There's going to be suffering. Suffering for ourselves, suffering for our friends, suffering for our family members. The world that we live in is full of it. And so to me, the one of the things I don't want to over-spiritualize anything or I don't want to get on a high horse or proselyze people here. But there's two things. Number one, one of the problems is that as people are exploring their religion or or exploring religion as as a whole, sometimes they epitomize or start begin worshiping the mouthpiece. You know, like what was his name? Jimmy f Jimmy Swaggard. Was it Swaggart? Yeah. I as a believer, I went to First Baptist Church in Keddy Freeway, where I met my wife, my second wife, and I used to watch Jimmy Swaggard on TV before I would leave to go to real church, you know, go to church. And then I can't tell you how disgruntled, dismayed, disappointed I was when he came out on national TV and basically said what he'd been doing. And he asked everybody for forgiveness, and everybody deserves forgiveness. So but I I was flabbergasted. I had him up on a on a pedestal and I thought he was I thought he was perfect, but there was only one perfect person and we hung him on a cross. Right. And then you have then you have people that say that they're believers in Jesus, so they're born again, full of the Holy Ghost, and their Bibles are full of dust. They don't open their Bibles, they don't read their Bibles, and they go to church, and so they hear about Jesus, quote unquote, from the pastor that's that's teaching them. They get they literally get thirty to forty-five minutes of Bible teaching a week, right? And you you can't that's not good. So when you go to church, it's like you the bur you said talked about the Bereans. Study the word and it what's the what's the scripture that says you're you sure should study to show show yourself approved or something along those lines. I just butchered it some, but but yeah, we we should read the we should read the Bible for ourselves, pray and ask God for understanding and all of that. So that's that is a that is a path forward. If you're if you you've lost a loved one, excuse me, and and you're you're you're facing your mortality, you're experiencing their mortality and and we're we're not promised to tomorrow, and we're all not we're none of us are gonna get out of this alive. Eventually, these bodies that we're living in, they're gonna fail. And we're gonna meet our maker. Whether you're just living life normally and you may not have any major issues going on, or maybe you are listening to this podcast and you just lost a loved one and you're you're struggling with eternity. You're struggling with is there really a heaven or is there really a hell? Is is Jesus real? Is the devil real? You have to you have to read the Bible for yourself, pray and ask God to to uh break it, break down the truth to you so that you'll understand it. And at that point, once you realize that those things are real and that they're but that there's hope, right? There's hope. And um So anyway, yeah. Thank you for sharing that story. You're welcome.

SPEAKER_02 38:44

Well you're right. So go ahead. Okay, I was just gonna say you're right, and we do have to we can have a personal living relationship with the true and living God. He offers that to us. He offers it to every single person. And we can choose that. And then we have to if if we then study the word and learn his word and learn him and get to know him personally in a very deep, intimate way. And that'll change our lives. And it's I I'm not over I don't spiritualizing, over spiritualizing. I don't believe in religiosity or fake spirituality. Talking about a true and living relationship with the true and living God who created the universe and spoke the world into being, and that's available to us. And I'm not saying there aren't other means of talking to people and counselors and getting help. I understand that those things are important too. But most important is our relationship with the true and living God, and it's available. And everyone needs that opportunity to get to know him, and they can have it.

SPEAKER_01 39:47

Amen. So, Tom, thank you for sharing your heart and your journey with us today. To our listeners, grief is not something we simply get over, it's something we learn to carry. My hope is that today's conversation reminds you that you're not alone in your pain, that healing often begins when we're willing to acknowledge our loss and invite others into the journey. If this episode encouraged you, please subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who may need hope today. Until next time, remember, even in the darkest valleys, there is a refuge. Take care and God bless. And Tom Snow, thank you for being here. Thanks for having me.