About Tom:
Ruts and scars. Not
very pretty things, are they? Yet the
Lord has been using both of them to
bring Tom Frye closer to Himself over
the past few years.
“Ruts can
often feel comfortable,” Tom
says in relating some of what God has
been teaching him, “and often
ruts even look good. But what
I’ve found in my life was that
my ruts were about following what
others thought I should be doing.
People in my family, in my church, or
even just society.”
“We so often
settle for status quo, but
there’s a danger in settling.
In the last two verses of Genesis,
chapter 11, we read about
Abram’s dad starting out for
Canaan, but then settling in Haran,
living there 205 years and
dying.” He settled for less
than what God had called him to,
living in his rut, instead of in the
will of God.
Over the past few
years, God has taught Tom about not
settling and has jerked him out of
many of his old ruts.
A man named Ted Bruun
once made a comment that resounded
within Tom’s heart. He said,
“If you want to plan your
life, God will let you; but if you
want God to plan your life, you need
to let go of your plans and follow
Him.”
Tom made that his
prayer, and over the next few months
God revealed to him a whole series of
plans that he had made for his life.
They weren’t bad plans -- on
the surface -- and in many ways they
even looked
“responsible“. But over
the course of time, it became clear
to Tom that the plans were made not
out of responsibility, but out of his
desire to feel safe. Not just in
regards to his personal well being,
career goals, and the like, but also
safe in regard to his desire to win
approval and favor from others. It
was, he says, ultimately his way to
guard his heart from the stinging
words that came from their frequent
disappointment with him.
“As MY plans
became more evident to me,”
Tom says, “I began to realize
what it means in Hebrews 12:1 when it
says to throw off everything that
hinders us.”
(“…therefore,
since we are surrounded by such a
great cloud of witnesses, let us
throw off everything that hinders and
sin that so easily entangles and let
us run with perseverance the race
marked out for us.” -- Hebrews
12:1)
“It became
painfully obvious as I worked to
unplan my life, and tear down the
emotional walls [the plans]
represented, that one of the
casualties would be giving up hope on
things I had long held to since my
childhood.”
It was then that Tom
began to realize that he had to move
his focus from protecting himself and
pleasing others to simply working to
please his heavenly Father.
God eventually led
Tom through the closing of his
boyhood church and finally into a
wonderful church where he and his own
family began to experience the
unconditional love of Jesus lived out
in a community of faith.
Though it was a
wonderful new experience,
Tom’s past only worked to
breed fear: fear that the love he was
experiencing would also prove to be
conditional.
Still the Lord worked
with him, and through a series of
events a prayer warrior approached
Tom to tell him of a vision that the
Lord had impressed on her, describing
in great detail what the vision was.
She told Tom that God told her,
“This is what freedom looks
like…” and that Tom was
to walk in that freedom.
That vision, Tom
relates, was a detailed retelling of
a recurring dream he had dreamed
since he was a boy.
Shortly after, Tom
was attending a conference when he
heard a man speak about knowing
one’s own story as it is
one’s story of how God has
impacted one’s life that will
bring about ministry.
“For the first
time, I began to unpack all the
hurts. Painful memories flooded my
mind for the next eight months as I
worked through my wounds,” Tom
remembers. “These memories
made me very bitter and angry as I
tried and failed to work through
them. God brought several people into
my life to continue to help pull my
story out of me.”
As 2007 was coming to
an end, Tom finally started to
understand that he was wounded by
people who themselves were
wounded…and who had never
sought healing.
“I learned
that my scars are my story because
they are evidence of God’s
healing mercy,” he says.
“We often
think our story is the songs we
write, the instruments we play. But
our story is not what we do; our
story is who we are in
Christ.”
The ruts we walked
in. The scars we have. They are the
things that show where we’ve
been in life. But they aren’t
the end of our story. With
God’s help, they can be just
the beginning.
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