Tom’s story is a God Story. Like many of us, Tom grew up in a family who had very little consciousness of God or who Jesus was during his youth. He tumbled through his childhood in West Texas but entered the teen years lost and fighting to find his place in the world. He, like many angry sons who cry out for much needed but ungiven attention, love and significance, started grabbing for all the wrong substitutes the world had to offer including drugs and alcohol. His one redeeming grace was that he developed a deep love of working with his hands in shop at school. He discovered he was very good at carpentry. No matter what substances he reached for in his free time, he would put them aside while working on a jobsite. No one particularly cared what Tom was doing, so he dropped out of high school in his senior year and devoted himself to working hard and partying hard.

His twenties were the “lost” years punctuated with heartaches, failures, a broken marriage and deep depression. However, a dim awareness of something bigger than himself started to bloom in Tom’s heart each time he was spared in situations that should have ended very, very badly. In his late twenties, Tom decided to try and fix his life and joined Toastmasters and started reading positive thinking books. He also ran into another carpenter on a jobsite who became a friend. This friend consistently invited Tom to church over a five year period. Around age thirty, Tom finally decided to go with the friend to church just so he would quit bugging him. About three weeks later a couple of the men from the church came to visit Tom. They explained more to him and during that conversation Tom’s eyes and heart were opened and He invited Jesus Christ into his life as Savior. The change was dramatic and all-encompassing. Tom instantly lost the desire for the final dregs of his old life – cigarettes, snuff, drinking, etc. Strangely, a new, overwhelming drive to create something artistic came over Tom. He, who had never even been in an art gallery or to an art show, felt compelled to start drawing and painting. He bought some supplies, rented an old warehouse and would drive his truck into it to disappear from his friends and he started creating things. Basically, he was all over the board artistically – painting cartoons on the walls, sculpting things out of wood, doing sketches of friends and people. He also saturated himself in the Word of God. Those two years sequestered alone with the Lord, His Word and art were the most powerfully transformative years of Tom’s life.

During that time he also attended church and started praying to have a family of his own. He wanted a wife with a heart and kids. Tom’s Mom suggested he try his hand at sculpting. When Tom touched the clay for the first time, that was “it” and he knew he had found his preferred medium even though he could paint as well as he could sculpt. I met Tom at church before the first armature had clay on it. I was divorced with four kids ages 3 to 16 and running a business the Lord had miraculously shepherded me to open earlier to take care of my children. You can understand my surprise when Tom, who is a few years younger than me, asked me out. I jokingly asked if he could count, reminding him that I had four kids! His response, “Icing on the cake, baby.” Within a week or two Tom told me he was going to marry me. I thought he was nuts, but he later told me that the Lord told him “that’s the one” the minute we spoke the first time and he set about winning my heart. The thing about Tom is that when the Lord tells him something, he has no fear, just complete confidence that the Lord said it and that settles it. Tom truly became father to the fatherless taking my abandoned children in with all of his heart, soul and mind. We also went on to have a daughter together and the first of our ten grandchildren and counting at the same time.

When Tom finished his first sculpture of a Native American, called “Edgewalker, I urged him to get it bronzed, but he thought sculpting was just going to be a hobby. We finally took the clay to a large foundry in Lubbock to see about casting it. The foundry owner thought Tom was lying when he told him it was his first sculpture. Then Tom told the man we thought you just dipped them like baby shoes and the foundry owner knew we weren’t lying, just ignorant of the process. The owner, a gracious Christian man, told Tom he had to work for twenty years as a sculptor to create something that good. He kindly proceeded to educate us on the process of transforming clay into bronze through the many steps and stages of molds, wax, wax chasing, ceramic slurry layers, molten bronze, chasing the metal, patina and sealing the bronze. We were overwhelmed and spent the next ten years of our marriage trying to figure out how to get Tom out of carpentry and into “art” while raising all those children and making a living. I sold my business and devoted my time to serving the Lord, my family, Tom and his drive to become a full-time sculptor. Tom started sculpting Biblical stories into tabletop sculptures and doing a few commissions of people. The Lord was pushing Tom out of western art into dynamic, figurative sculptures of people as a master storyteller. No one was as surprised as Tom at finding out that he could actually duplicate a person’s features and that he could capture their spirit as well.