Cloud Puffs and Brake Dust, Part 1

A teenage inventor tries to fix a problem the world ignored and ends up breathing in the very danger he set out to contain. That choice ripples through his family, culminating in a loss that shatters his certainty and leaves him convinced he deserves whatever comes next. When Tom finds a hard lump near his liver, he decides to stay silent, wear the guilt, and wait for the inevitable—until a moment of raw encounter breaks in like thunder and floods the room with love he didn’t know existed.

We walk with Tom from a childhood shaped by hidden Jewish roots and a father who spoke in formulas, to the dizzy pride of winning science fairs with a brake-dust device built on insight and blind spots. The story pivots when asbestos exposure intersects with his mother’s illness, turning intellect into anguish and engineering into accusation. For months, visions of cloud-framed scenes reveal a world that goes on without him, untethering the belief that performance holds everything together. Then, an audible voice speaks two sentences that cut through fear and reframe the future: unconditional love now, and a promise that suggests tomorrow still belongs to him.

This episode blends faith, science, trauma, and hope into a narrative that asks hard questions about responsibility, suffering, and what it means to be seen by God. We don’t rush the answers. Instead, we open space for the tension between data and mystery, between guilt and grace, and we sit with the shock of being loved before we’ve made anything right. If you’ve wrestled with shame, felt crushed by the outcomes of your best intentions, or wondered whether God still speaks, this story will meet you where you’re most human and point toward a wider horizon.

If the conversation moved you, share it with a friend, tap follow to catch part two, and leave a review with your biggest question—we’re listening and we’ll bring your questions into the next chapter.

Website: https://just2beclear.com/. [To Learn More About Tom's Current and Upcoming Books] 

Substack: https://just2beclear1.substack.com/ [For Blogs, Posts, and Podcasts Tom Has Been On.] 

"The Daily Stand" on Aamzon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DPNFRW3T

"Set The Captives Free" on Amazon https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FCJ2Z2LN

FaceBook: https://www.facebook.com/just2beclear

Instagram:  https://www.instagram.com/just2beclear1

Direct Email: tsnow@justtobeclwar.com 

"The Flowers You Are Picking Today Come From the Seeds You Planted Yesterday. Don't Like Your Boquet Of Flowers? Then Change the Seeds You Are Planting Today." Chaplain Terry 

Transcript

Tom’s Beliefs and Background

Chaplain Terry 0:03

Hello friends. Chaplain Terry Warner here. My guest today is Tom Snow, a quite interesting and very uh nice gentleman. I'll read a little bit about him, but I'm gonna let him do most of the talking. Tom's a conservative believer, he's not a part of any organized religion or denomination. He's a Jewish Christian. He believes there's one God and all are equal in God's creation. That there's only one true church, which is the body of Christ. Jesus, of course, being the head. He believes in God's light that dispels darkness and binarily separates the truth from life. He believes like I believe. That's what that sums it up right there in a nutshell. And instead of me reading all the accolades and going on, you're not you didn't tune in to listen to me anyway. Tom, I'm gonna turn it over to you right now. And one of the things that's uh really pops out interesting in your bio is this church in Egypt.

Tom Snow 1:14

Okay.

Chaplain Terry 1:15

The floor is yours. Go ahead and tell us a little bit about yourself first.

Hidden Jewish Identity and Family History

Childhood, Father’s Standards, and Ego

Tom Snow 1:20

Okay. Yeah, uh Egypt and the Church is in my second book. Uh tell me I'll tell you a little about me. Of course, I can get long-winded. You have to might ring ring me in. Um my I met the Lord when I was 16. Uh 55 years ago. So we're both young pups. And um yeah, I actually was dying of cancer. Um I was born a Jew from both sides of the lineage. I had uh not met the Lord. My parents raised me in denominational churches because they were hiding as Jews hide. 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. 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. 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. So I grew up not knowing until even after my salvation that I was a Jew from both sides. 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. Um, so I was raised in denominational churches, uh, Presbyterian, Lutheran, but none of them taught the gospel. I didn't know how to meet the Lord, what that really meant. Well, in the late 60s, uh, as a youth, I was uh creating inventions. Um I had a big ego, youngest of three boys. Um, I was the only one who could have my father's attention, a double major engineer. All he wanted was to talk about science and math. He didn't care about baseball or throw a ball or take you fishing, didn't get any of that. So to have his favor, I had to sit at the kitchen table and learn. I knew trigonometry by the time I was in sixth grade.

Chaplain Terry 4:06

So well, just as we're doing multiplication tables, right?

Asbestos Realization and Science Fairs

Tom Snow 4:10

But to have his favor, right? Which I had. 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. 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. So um I had a big ego, wanted to prove to him how smart I was. I would win my school science fairs, take them up to the state science fair and win them. 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. 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. And all of a sudden I stopped and thought, wait, what are brake shoes made of? From the beginning of the 1900s up through 1997, brake shoes were made with asbestos.

Chaplain Terry 5:21

And we used asbestos for everything, right?

Tom Snow 5:23

We use it as fire return retardant. It's you know, it was probably in the everybody's um, you know, fire department suits. It was, you know, it was super protective, fire resistant, and very dense material. Well, it's not the denseness that hurts you, it's the little fibers. And when they get in the air, it doesn't cause cancer, heart disease by itself. Each little fiber goes into one lung areole, right? And one fiber can disrupt, disrupt that areole, kills it, destroys it. We have 600,000 areoli, but that only gets so good if you breathe a bunch of asbestos in.

Chaplain Terry 6:00

I did commercial refrigeration and heating and air conditioning. We use asbestos a lot, blankets. We use it for slates, we cut it with a saw, threw dust everywhere, you know. Right? Right. Yeah.

Tom Snow 6:12

And and and nobody like the scientific community knew about it. I was learning my own science class, and yet it was like nobody's putting two and two together that we have brake dust. 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? It came out to be 60 million tons of brake dust per year around the world.

Chaplain Terry 6:43

Oh gosh.

Brake-Dust Invention and Exposure

Tom Snow 6:44

So blowing around in the air. Blowing around in the air. No wonder we have sickness and health issues, and that didn't get stopped by by the EPA until 97. Yeah.

Chaplain Terry 6:57

On a side note, I was uh sprayed with Ancient Orange when I was in Vietnam, and sort of the same thing. The year that they sprayed that was the year they used the most. They used around 600,000 gallons in the top, but then when the my year they used over a million gallons. So you have ancient orange everywhere, right?

Tom Snow 7:18

Right. Anyway, terrible, terrible things that weren't stopped for many years that hurt many people.

Chaplain Terry 7:25

So then did you start looking at did you get checked out medically, or did you just start not feeling good?

Mother’s Illness and Death

Tom Snow 7:32

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. 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. And so to test this, I'll get to the heat, to the sickness in a bit. So, but uh, I could go to the brake shops and they had tons of brake dust laying all over the place. I'd ask them for the brake dust, and they'd be like, sure, sweep it up. It's yours. We don't have to sweep it up. I'd come home with bags and bags of brake dust and run it through my machine. Well, now, you know, because you can't run sawdust, it doesn't weigh the same, right? This is asbestos is very dense, very heavy. And so I would have, as I'm testing, mounds and mounds of this dust flying in the air. Now, as I say, you know, God had given me a lot of smarts, but I didn't have any common sense. Now, maybe that goes with being a 14-year-old, but I had no common sense, right? Like, here you've just been studying about the dangers of asbestos. Here you want to create an invention to encapsulate this, and now you're blowing it in the air all over yourself. 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. My father was 1960s, disciplined with the belt and the fist. Um, nowadays be thrown in jail, but that was the norm in the 60s. 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. Well, I went on to wait win the state science fair with the invention. I my pet father and I actually had it checked out that it was patentable. We did patent search on it, but all of a sudden that fell aside because my mother became sick. 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.

Chaplain Terry 10:15

Oh my.

Tom’s Tumor and Crushing Guilt

Visions of Life Without Him

The Audible Voice and Overwhelming Love

Tom Snow 10:16

And now, all of a sudden, my ego doesn't mean anything. Now the guilt of the world is on me that I just killed my mother. For my stupid ego, I killed my mother. That was hard to bear. One month after she dies, I noticed a rock hard tumor in my abdomen where my liver was, about the size of a walnut. And I knew because I knew because I knew. 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. 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. And she had just passed, but now I knew it was cancer, but I felt I deserved it. 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. So I wouldn't tell anybody. But the fear of death, the fear of future, the fear of eternity, because I believed God was out there somewhere. I had been raised in denominational churches, and I believed he was out there somewhere, but and he was God. But you know, what about me? I deserve to die, but uh, do I get to go to heaven? You know, those are troubling questions. I'm now a 14, 15-year-old, troubled with all this stuff. So I'm going through tremendous guilt. Well, for the next four months, I would come home from high school by myself. 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. 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. I didn't know it was from God. Just like we as believers would see visions, but I wasn't a believer yet. 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. And I'd look on these cloud puffs, and the scenes were without me. Life going on without me, every single one. And I could see this day in and day out for four months, and it scared me. 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. The world's gonna stop when I stop. 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. One day, sitting there in my family room, God spoke to me audibly. First and only time I've ever heard him that audible. Now we all can hear the still small quiet voice as believers.

Chaplain Terry 13:38

Right.

Cliffhanger and Next Session Tease

Tom Snow 13:39

And we can have that day in and day out. We have to learn to distinguish the right voice of God versus the others. But let's just say we have, we can hear that. 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. You know, and it was just so crazy, wonderful, crazy everything. But what it was was also full of love. The love of God that passes understanding, just like the peace that passes understanding, Philippians 4 7. That love was overwhelming, and I and I felt the love of God. 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. He said, I love you, and someday I'll provide you a perfect mate for you. Now, the I love you was obvious. The room was full of love, a love that didn't compare. I thought my mother had love. Her love was like this tiny compared to God's unlimited love. Amazing amount of love. Um, and so in that, I knew that he said that he meant it. The second part, someday I'll provide a perfect mate for you. Come on, God, that makes no sense. 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. Yeah, I know you're busy, and you somebody didn't give you that memo. Maybe one of the angels didn't give you the memo. Well, you know, that second part made no sense because I wasn't going to make it long. But the second part I just set it aside because it didn't mean anything. The first part rang through me, every part of my being. 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. And he actually loves me in spite of all the terrible things I did, like killing my mother. That's what I felt like. There's other reasons. He I didn't know it then. There's curses coming down the generations, Jewish curses, but I didn't know any of that until many years later. So all I knew in the moment is I am number one, the guilt goes on me.

Chaplain Terry 16:09

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. This is really interesting. So, friends, I'm asking you uh let's just take a break here. We'll do another session and then we'll get over this on it again, if that's okay with you.

Tom Snow 16:37

Thank you for having me.

Chaplain Terry 16:39

You're welcome. All right, I don't see if I can stop this recording.