I want to just start the message this morning by sharing a little bit about my testimony, just a portion of my testimony. when I was in early college, I had the privilege of working for a boys' camp called Robert M. Pyle Boys Camp. And this camp basically takes boys from all around Southern California who come from difficult backgrounds, underprivileged, and a lot of these boys have gone through abuse situations.
And they bring them up to the Sierra Nevada for an experience in the mountains that many of these boys have never even been to the mountains, they've never seen snow. And, and I had the opportunity to be a counselor and take around 89 of these boys, for a 2-week period and you take them on a backpacking trip, and it's, it's a lot of fun, it can be really challenging. But I remember, speaking with our director, a man named Rocky, who is a believer. And we were talking about the situation that one of my boys had been going through.
He had come from an abuses background, and I remember Rocky, who had just had, I think, his 2nd child at the time, and he looked at me and he said, Mike, before I had children, I never thought that I could harm another human being. But when I consider what's happened to this abused kid in my group, and I think of that happening to my kids, I could kill somebody. And even though I wasn't a parent at the time, I could, there's a part of me that could relate to that story because even though I wasn't a parent back in Bakersfield, I had been through a situation where I'd experienced abuse with my siblings. And so I could reflect back upon that situation and think, yeah, I, I could, I could see myself wishing someone harm, wishing that someone had died.
In fact, After I became a parent, I started to reflect and I and think about what what must my mom have felt and gone through when she pulled up one day in Bakersfield in her car, I was out riding my bike with friends. And she had just found out about part of the second abuse situation, pulls up, says, Give your bike to your friends, get in the car. We're leaving. And so I jumped in the car and she drove us up to Bishop and she got us out of this terrible situation and brought us to stay with our grandparents for a time....
