Now We Are Crazy People
By Emily Stroble | February 8, 2022Tom’s mother came home and announced to her family, “I have heard the gospel, and I’ve learned how to pray in the name of Jesus.”
It surprised Tom. In Spain, Tom and his family were surrounded by Christian tradition. His mother was a sincere Catholic. Weren’t they already Christians?
“I thought it was strange,” Tom remembers. “She had always taught us that there was no salvation outside of the Catholic Church.”
Tom’s mother explained she had attended a meeting in a house church where her heart trouble had been miraculously healed! Eagerly, she showed her family how she had learned to pray.
All at once, everything changed.
“I thought something was wrong with my father,” Tom says. “Suddenly, he began speaking in tongues. I thought, ‘well, now we are protestants and crazy people.’ It was a life-changing experience.”
But it was months before Tom believed the gospel for himself.
Tom wrestled with the “crazy” power he had witnessed, wanting to trust but struggling with the impossibility of it all.
Tom (right) baptizes a new believer in 1997.
“I thought something was wrong with my father,” Tom says. “Suddenly, he began speaking in tongues. I thought, ‘well, now we are protestants and crazy people.’ It was a life-changing experience.”
But it was months before Tom believed the gospel for himself.
Tom wrestled with the “crazy” power he had witnessed, wanting to trust but struggling with the impossibility of it all.
“It was painful,” he says. “I knew that the experience my family had gone through was real…I could not deny that…They opened their hearts from the very beginning. I wish I could have been like them. But God had his own way for me… God, in his mercy, helped me to conquer all those doubts. I can say with the apostle Paul, ‘I know whom I have believed.’”
Once the gospel took hold of Tom, he became unstoppable.
A young Tom (right) prays with Bernard Clement in 1997
“I read in the Bible there is salvation only in Jesus. And I thought, if this is true, everyone has to hear this as soon as possible. I wanted to tell others that God was real in a very tangible way.”
At 14, Tom organized other young people in his church into home-to-home outreach teams.
At 18, he felt a call to full-time ministry.
A woman at a prayer meeting prophesied that Tom would take the gospel to all of Spain and beyond!
The only problem was that a successful fashion company had also seen Tom’s potential and offered him a scholarship and a job. They said he was destined to be a company director! Tom stood on the brink of two destinies.
Tom tried to argue with God’s call. “I told God, ‘I can serve you in any place,’” he said. “But the Lord was not swayed by my arguments. He said ‘no.’”
It was crazy to refuse the fashion company’s offer. Tom’s grandmother told him so.
“You don’t know what you are doing. You don’t know where you are going. You will be sorry,” she said.
“She was wrong in two things,” Tom says. “I did know what I was doing. And I have never repented. She was right that I did not know where I was going.”
