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Cloud Puffs and Brake Dust, Part 1 · The Chaplain's Corner

• 0:03
  Chaplain Terry: Hello friends.
• 0:04
  Chaplain Terry: Chaplain Terry Warner here.
• 0:06
  Chaplain Terry: My guest today is Tom Snow, a quite interesting and very uh nice gentleman.
• 0:14
  Chaplain Terry: I'll read a little bit about him, but I'm gonna let him do most of the talking.
• 0:19
  Chaplain Terry: Tom's a conservative believer, he's not a part of any organized religion or denomination.
• 0:26
  Chaplain Terry: He's a Jewish Christian.
• 0:28
  Chaplain Terry: He believes there's one God and all are equal in God's creation.
• 0:32
  Chaplain Terry: That there's only one true church, which is the body of Christ.
• 0:36
  Chaplain Terry: Jesus, of course, being the head.
• 0:38
  Chaplain Terry: He believes in God's light that dispels darkness and binarily separates the truth from life.
• 0:48
  Chaplain Terry: He believes like I believe.
• 0:50
  Chaplain Terry: That's what that sums it up right there in a nutshell.
• 0:54
  Chaplain Terry: And instead of me reading all the accolades and going on, you're not you didn't tune in to listen to me anyway.
• 1:01
  Chaplain Terry: Tom, I'm gonna turn it over to you right now.
• 1:03
  Chaplain Terry: And one of the things that's uh really pops out interesting in your bio is this church in Egypt.
• 1:14
  Tom Snow: Okay.
• 1:15
  Chaplain Terry: The floor is yours.
• 1:17
  Chaplain Terry: Go ahead and tell us a little bit about yourself first.
• 1:20
  Tom Snow: Okay.
• 1:21
  Tom Snow: Yeah, uh Egypt and the Church is in my second book.
• 1:24
  Tom Snow: Uh tell me I'll tell you a little about me.
• 1:26
  Tom Snow: Of course, I can get long-winded.
• 1:28
  Tom Snow: You have to might ring ring me in.
• 1:30
  Tom Snow: Um my I met the Lord when I was 16.
• 1:36
  Tom Snow: Uh 55 years ago.
• 1:40
  Tom Snow: So we're both young pups.
• 1:43
  Tom Snow: And um yeah, I actually was dying of cancer.
• 1:49
  Tom Snow: Um I was born a Jew from both sides of the lineage.
• 1:54
  Tom Snow: I had uh not met the Lord.
• 1:57
  Tom Snow: My parents raised me in denominational churches because they were hiding as Jews hide.
• 2:04
  Tom Snow: Uh, they were raised with a lot of persecution, murder in the family by Christians, uh, you know, all these leaders, uh not just Hitler, but before that too.
• 2:14
  Tom Snow: Uh and so when Hitler came out in 39, my parents chose to hide, and uh they both spoke multi-multi-languages, and they moved to the border of Texas to hide there, and they so if Hitler's spies came to America, which the Jews believed he would, uh, that they could slip over into Mexico and hide.
• 2:42
  Tom Snow: Um they told their families that they're going to be, quote unquote, become Christians, and if the families could accept it or not, then too bad.
• 2:53
  Tom Snow: So I grew up not knowing until even after my salvation that I was a Jew from both sides.
• 3:00
  Tom Snow: Somewhere along the line, my mother had met the Lord instead of just faking being a Christian, and she had a solid, wonderful walk with the Lord.
• 3:13
  Tom Snow: Um, so I was raised in denominational churches, uh, Presbyterian, Lutheran, but none of them taught the gospel.
• 3:23
  Tom Snow: I didn't know how to meet the Lord, what that really meant.
• 3:27
  Tom Snow: Well, in the late 60s, uh, as a youth, I was uh creating inventions.
• 3:36
  Tom Snow: Um I had a big ego, youngest of three boys.
• 3:42
  Tom Snow: Um, I was the only one who could have my father's attention, a double major engineer.
• 3:48
  Tom Snow: All he wanted was to talk about science and math.
• 3:51
  Tom Snow: He didn't care about baseball or throw a ball or take you fishing, didn't get any of that.
• 3:58
  Tom Snow: So to have his favor, I had to sit at the kitchen table and learn.
• 4:02
  Tom Snow: I knew trigonometry by the time I was in sixth grade.
• 4:06
  Chaplain Terry: So well, just as we're doing multiplication tables, right?
• 4:10
  Tom Snow: But to have his favor, right?
• 4:12
  Tom Snow: Which I had.
• 4:14
  Tom Snow: And unfortunately, he would then compare my two older brothers to me and belittle them for not having, you know, you know, the that attention.
• 4:23
  Tom Snow: Well, that did that didn't help me with my relationship with my brothers, but once again, I I wanted my father's favor and attention.
• 4:31
  Tom Snow: So um I had a big ego, wanted to prove to him how smart I was.
• 4:39
  Tom Snow: I would win my school science fairs, take them up to the state science fair and win them.
• 4:44
  Tom Snow: And when I was 14, I was studying in school about asbestos, the you know, sickness of the disease, you know, what causes all these lung diseases that also in turn cause cancer and heart disease.
• 5:00
  Tom Snow: And all of a sudden I realized, I thought, wait a minute, they're talking about asbestos, like it's out in the, you know, in the nether.
• 5:09
  Tom Snow: And all of a sudden I stopped and thought, wait, what are brake shoes made of?
• 5:14
  Tom Snow: From the beginning of the 1900s up through 1997, brake shoes were made with asbestos.
• 5:21
  Chaplain Terry: And we used asbestos for everything, right?
• 5:23
  Tom Snow: We use it as fire return retardant.
• 5:26
  Tom Snow: It's you know, it was probably in the everybody's um, you know, fire department suits.
• 5:32
  Tom Snow: It was, you know, it was super protective, fire resistant, and very dense material.
• 5:38
  Tom Snow: Well, it's not the denseness that hurts you, it's the little fibers.
• 5:41
  Tom Snow: And when they get in the air, it doesn't cause cancer, heart disease by itself.
• 5:46
  Tom Snow: Each little fiber goes into one lung areole, right?
• 5:50
  Tom Snow: And one fiber can disrupt, disrupt that areole, kills it, destroys it.
• 5:54
  Tom Snow: We have 600,000 areoli, but that only gets so good if you breathe a bunch of asbestos in.
• 6:00
  Chaplain Terry: I did commercial refrigeration and heating and air conditioning.
• 6:03
  Chaplain Terry: We use asbestos a lot, blankets.
• 6:06
  Chaplain Terry: We use it for slates, we cut it with a saw, threw dust everywhere, you know.
• 6:11
  Chaplain Terry: Right?
• 6:11
  Chaplain Terry: Right.
• 6:11
  Chaplain Terry: Yeah.
• 6:12
  Tom Snow: And and and nobody like the scientific community knew about it.
• 6:17
  Tom Snow: I was learning my own science class, and yet it was like nobody's putting two and two together that we have brake dust.
• 6:24
  Tom Snow: And so then I just did a little math, and I said, okay, you know, if each brake shoe is this much and there's this many cars in the US and the world, how much brake dust is being going in the air every year?
• 6:36
  Tom Snow: It came out to be 60 million tons of brake dust per year around the world.
• 6:43
  Chaplain Terry: Oh gosh.
• 6:44
  Tom Snow: So blowing around in the air.
• 6:46
  Tom Snow: Blowing around in the air.
• 6:47
  Tom Snow: No wonder we have sickness and health issues, and that didn't get stopped by by the EPA until 97.
• 6:56
  Tom Snow: Yeah.
• 6:57
  Chaplain Terry: On a side note, I was uh sprayed with Ancient Orange when I was in Vietnam, and sort of the same thing.
• 7:04
  Chaplain Terry: The year that they sprayed that was the year they used the most.
• 7:08
  Chaplain Terry: They used around 600,000 gallons in the top, but then when the my year they used over a million gallons.
• 7:16
  Chaplain Terry: So you have ancient orange everywhere, right?
• 7:18
  Tom Snow: Right.
• 7:19
  Tom Snow: Anyway, terrible, terrible things that weren't stopped for many years that hurt many people.
• 7:25
  Chaplain Terry: So then did you start looking at did you get checked out medically, or did you just start not feeling good?
• 7:32
  Tom Snow: Or well, um what happened was I was creating this, I created an invention that wrapped around the uh brakes around on every wheel, uh-huh, and it would encompass it, encase it, and allow that the airflow as you drove down the road would blow, would pick up all that dust and put it into a bag in the back so you could dispose of it.
• 7:56
  Tom Snow: I created this invention, my ego, wanting to please my father, wanting to win the state science fair, wanting to create an invention, you know, 14-year-old ego.
• 8:07
  Tom Snow: And so to test this, I'll get to the heat, to the sickness in a bit.
• 8:13
  Tom Snow: So, but uh, I could go to the brake shops and they had tons of brake dust laying all over the place.
• 8:20
  Tom Snow: I'd ask them for the brake dust, and they'd be like, sure, sweep it up.
• 8:23
  Tom Snow: It's yours.
• 8:24
  Tom Snow: We don't have to sweep it up.
• 8:26
  Tom Snow: I'd come home with bags and bags of brake dust and run it through my machine.
• 8:32
  Tom Snow: Well, now, you know, because you can't run sawdust, it doesn't weigh the same, right?
• 8:37
  Tom Snow: This is asbestos is very dense, very heavy.
• 8:40
  Tom Snow: And so I would have, as I'm testing, mounds and mounds of this dust flying in the air.
• 8:47
  Tom Snow: Now, as I say, you know, God had given me a lot of smarts, but I didn't have any common sense.
• 8:54
  Tom Snow: Now, maybe that goes with being a 14-year-old, but I had no common sense, right?
• 8:58
  Tom Snow: Like, here you've just been studying about the dangers of asbestos.
• 9:02
  Tom Snow: Here you want to create an invention to encapsulate this, and now you're blowing it in the air all over yourself.
• 9:09
  Tom Snow: And on top of that, my mother, who both my father and mother worked 16-hour days, and my mother was the only source of love in the family.
• 9:18
  Tom Snow: My father was 1960s, disciplined with the belt and the fist.
• 9:24
  Tom Snow: Um, nowadays be thrown in jail, but that was the norm in the 60s.
• 9:29
  Tom Snow: Yes, and so, you know, um so my mother would come down, the only source of love she would, and she like, you know, give all the kudos for me doing all this work and creating this nice invention.
• 9:44
  Tom Snow: Well, I went on to wait win the state science fair with the invention.
• 9:49
  Tom Snow: I my pet father and I actually had it checked out that it was patentable.
• 9:54
  Tom Snow: We did patent search on it, but all of a sudden that fell aside because my mother became sick.
• 10:01
  Tom Snow: She got cancer, it riddled through her body, she got a hysterectomy, a double massectomy, went into her lymph system, settled in her liver, and killed her.
• 10:15
  Chaplain Terry: Oh my.
• 10:16
  Tom Snow: And now, all of a sudden, my ego doesn't mean anything.
• 10:20
  Tom Snow: Now the guilt of the world is on me that I just killed my mother.
• 10:26
  Tom Snow: For my stupid ego, I killed my mother.
• 10:30
  Tom Snow: That was hard to bear.
• 10:33
  Tom Snow: One month after she dies, I noticed a rock hard tumor in my abdomen where my liver was, about the size of a walnut.
• 10:41
  Tom Snow: And I knew because I knew because I knew.
• 10:45
  Tom Snow: Now, those of us who are believers who walk with the Lord know with the Holy Spirit, you can know because you know because you know, by the Spirit of God.
• 10:53
  Tom Snow: Well, I wasn't a Christian yet, but I did have a believing mother who had been praying for her boys who didn't fear death, which just scared me more that she didn't.
• 11:03
  Tom Snow: And she had just passed, but now I knew it was cancer, but I felt I deserved it.
• 11:10
  Tom Snow: So at this point, I'm not gonna tell anybody because my punishment is I need to pay the price, I'm gonna have to die too.
• 11:19
  Tom Snow: So I wouldn't tell anybody.
• 11:21
  Tom Snow: But the fear of death, the fear of future, the fear of eternity, because I believed God was out there somewhere.
• 11:28
  Tom Snow: I had been raised in denominational churches, and I believed he was out there somewhere, but and he was God.
• 11:35
  Tom Snow: But you know, what about me?
• 11:39
  Tom Snow: I deserve to die, but uh, do I get to go to heaven?
• 11:42
  Tom Snow: You know, those are troubling questions.
• 11:44
  Tom Snow: I'm now a 14, 15-year-old, troubled with all this stuff.
• 11:49
  Tom Snow: So I'm going through tremendous guilt.
• 11:52
  Tom Snow: Well, for the next four months, I would come home from high school by myself.
• 11:58
  Tom Snow: My brothers were away in college in the military, my father working 16 hours a day, definitely drowning himself in work because he's just lost his wife, my mother.
• 12:08
  Tom Snow: And so I'd come home and I would sit in my family room, and every time I close my eyes, I would see a vision from God.
• 12:18
  Tom Snow: I didn't know it was from God.
• 12:20
  Tom Snow: Just like we as believers would see visions, but I wasn't a believer yet.
• 12:23
  Tom Snow: And every time I close my eyes, I'd see a series of cloud puffs going from one end of the horizon to the next, and on top of every cloud puff was a scene in time.
• 12:34
  Tom Snow: And I'd look on these cloud puffs, and the scenes were without me.
• 12:40
  Tom Snow: Life going on without me, every single one.
• 12:44
  Tom Snow: And I could see this day in and day out for four months, and it scared me.
• 12:52
  Tom Snow: It scared the bejeebies out of me because now I know I'm dying, and I now I'm it's I'm facing the reality of eternity, that time's going on, and the scenes show me life's gonna go on without me, that I'm not the center of the world, I'm not the hub.
• 13:09
  Tom Snow: The world's gonna stop when I stop.
• 13:12
  Tom Snow: I'm facing a lot of reality, and so in the midst of all that trouble and fear and guilt and and probably hate towards myself and anger, in the midst of that and wondering where I'm gonna go for eternity.
• 13:26
  Tom Snow: One day, sitting there in my family room, God spoke to me audibly.
• 13:31
  Tom Snow: First and only time I've ever heard him that audible.
• 13:35
  Tom Snow: Now we all can hear the still small quiet voice as believers.
• 13:38
  Chaplain Terry: Right.
• 13:39
  Tom Snow: And we can have that day in and day out.
• 13:41
  Tom Snow: We have to learn to distinguish the right voice of God versus the others.
• 13:45
  Tom Snow: But let's just say we have, we can hear that.
• 13:48
  Tom Snow: But this was the audible, and it was so loud it filled the house, it filled the room, it sounded like roaring thunder just blasting everywhere, rivers of living water just flowing all around me, like John 7.
• 14:02
  Tom Snow: You know, and it was just so crazy, wonderful, crazy everything.
• 14:08
  Tom Snow: But what it was was also full of love.
• 14:12
  Tom Snow: The love of God that passes understanding, just like the peace that passes understanding, Philippians 4 7.
• 14:21
  Tom Snow: That love was overwhelming, and I and I felt the love of God.
• 14:26
  Tom Snow: And here it was, the God of the universe took out his time to come visit little old me, and he told me two things.
• 14:35
  Tom Snow: He said, I love you, and someday I'll provide you a perfect mate for you.
• 14:42
  Tom Snow: Now, the I love you was obvious.
• 14:45
  Tom Snow: The room was full of love, a love that didn't compare.
• 14:48
  Tom Snow: I thought my mother had love.
• 14:50
  Tom Snow: Her love was like this tiny compared to God's unlimited love.
• 14:54
  Tom Snow: Amazing amount of love.
• 14:56
  Tom Snow: Um, and so in that, I knew that he said that he meant it.
• 15:03
  Tom Snow: The second part, someday I'll provide a perfect mate for you.
• 15:07
  Tom Snow: Come on, God, that makes no sense.
• 15:09
  Tom Snow: God, I know you're busy and you're like in charge of the whole world and the whole universe, and you made everything, but you probably didn't get the memo that I'm about to be six feet under.
• 15:20
  Tom Snow: Yeah, I know you're busy, and you somebody didn't give you that memo.
• 15:24
  Tom Snow: Maybe one of the angels didn't give you the memo.
• 15:25
  Tom Snow: Well, you know, that second part made no sense because I wasn't going to make it long.
• 15:31
  Tom Snow: But the second part I just set it aside because it didn't mean anything.
• 15:35
  Tom Snow: The first part rang through me, every part of my being.
• 15:38
  Tom Snow: And now I began to cry out how do I reach that true and living God who just spoke to me, who just shattered my world in the best of all ways.
• 15:47
  Tom Snow: And he actually loves me in spite of all the terrible things I did, like killing my mother.
• 15:54
  Tom Snow: That's what I felt like.
• 15:55
  Tom Snow: There's other reasons.
• 15:57
  Tom Snow: He I didn't know it then.
• 15:58
  Tom Snow: There's curses coming down the generations, Jewish curses, but I didn't know any of that until many years later.
• 16:03
  Tom Snow: So all I knew in the moment is I am number one, the guilt goes on me.
• 16:09
  Chaplain Terry: Well, I see we're gonna reach a stopping point where we need to take us to the edge of the cliff and then pick up another part, maybe even three parts, because I see we got a little ways to go.
• 16:23
  Chaplain Terry: This is really interesting.
• 16:25
  Chaplain Terry: So, friends, I'm asking you uh let's just take a break here.
• 16:30
  Chaplain Terry: We'll do another session and then we'll get over this on it again, if that's okay with you.
• 16:37
  Tom Snow: Thank you for having me.
• 16:39
  Chaplain Terry: You're welcome.
• 16:39
  Chaplain Terry: All right, I don't see if I can stop this recording.