Steve Nikoui, father of Marine Lance Corporal Karim Nakoui killed in the 2021 Abbey Gate bombing during Biden’s chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal, exposed the administration’s failures by interrupting the State of the Union. He revealed military inconsistencies—like a bullet hole in Karim’s knife—and criticized Biden’s refusal to acknowledge the 13 U.S. and 170 Afghan lives lost. Nikoui’s coalition pushed for accountability, facing disrespect at Dover Air Force Base and congressional obstruction, yet secured hearings under McCarthy while warning against political exploitation of grief. His fight underscores systemic neglect of Gold Star families amid a withdrawal marred by incompetence and unanswered questions. [Automatically generated summary]
By August of 2021, Kabul, Afghanistan looked a lot like, well, Saigon, Vietnam looked in April of 1975.
Chaotic, dangerous, and humiliating to the United States.
After 20 years in Afghanistan, the Biden administration had just pulled American troops out.
The city immediately fell to the Taliban.
The president got on a private plane with millions of American dollars and ran away like the coward he is.
And thousands of Afghan civilians were rushing to Hamid Karzai airport in a desperate attempt to flee the country, sort of like those helicopters taking off from the roof of the embassy in 1975.
So U.S. service members were deployed to the scene to help keep the peace, but it was an impossible task.
Mobs of Afghans running on the runway trying to board flights, some clinging to the landing gear.
You remember the pictures.
And in the middle of that scene, that total chaos created by the Biden administration, a suicide bomber arrived carrying 20 pounds of explosives and made his way to a place called the Abbey Gate, the entrance to the airport, and then detonated the device.
And in so doing, murdered 13 American service members along with 170 Afghans, men, women, and children.
One of the Americans murdered that day was a Marine Lance corporal called Karim Nakoui.
He was just 20, 20 years old.
He is now credited with saving the lives of at least three Afghan families and helped getting them out of that country.
Fast forward to 2024, and Joe Biden is hoping as he stands for re-election at the advanced age of 81, that you've completely forgotten what he did in Afghanistan and the humiliating and deadly way he withdrew American forces from that country.
But not everyone has forgotten.
In fact, those touched by the tragedy of that day and the preceding 20 years will never forget.
Now, if you watched Biden's State of the Union address earlier this month, you heard a man in the audience yell out to Biden, reminding him of the killings that took place at the Abbey Gate at the airport in Kabul.
And so we were hoping that, all right, well, these two family members, you know, they're going to be able to go and he might, you know, bring up Afghanistan and say their names.
Now, for me, I had never done any interviews.
The only interview that I really did was an interview I'd done with you at the very beginning.
And after his first State of the Union, for whatever reason, I was at work and I got a call from some young man.
Hey, look, we're trying to fill in a spot in our news thing at 2 o'clock or whatever time was.
Would you come on?
And I'm like, well, I don't do interviews.
Well, look, I need to have someone, please.
And he kept begging and was persistent.
And he was all, you know, we want to ask you about Joe Biden's State of the Union.
Now, this is the first one that he had done after the withdrawal.
So even in Dover, when we had first met, you know, when we had met him in the dignified transfer, he said, hey, look, you know, I understand what you're going through.
We lost our son, Bo as well.
Now, in there, I wasn't, I, so people had a chance to whether or not they wanted to meet with the president.
And if some people didn't want to meet with them, they could go to another room.
I wasn't going to be bullied and go to another room, but, you know, I turned my back to him.
You know, at the time, I think, well, you know, I'm doing this for my country.
You know, I mean, I felt like almost obligated that I had to do this.
Yes.
Know and like here, this is, but like, oh, they're honoring us like a stateside honoring when, when, in retrospect, you know, it was just trying to show, like, oh, we're honoring these parents, and that's the end of it.
Do you kind of understand what I'm saying?
It's like the optics, like, here, look what we're doing.
And it was, it was very, this is the first time I'd seen all the other parents.
And remind you, this is two days after it happened.
So, the next day after this all happens, you don't have time to grieve.
You have the military telling you, you have to sign these papers.
We got to go over here to Dover, Delaware.
And I'm like, what's in Dover, Delaware?
I have no idea what they're talking in any of this.
I have to Google everything.
I have to research what a dignified transfer is.
You know, I'm, I have no idea.
And they're telling you, you know, you just lost your kid.
Now they're saying you have to go to Delaware and et cetera, et cetera.
So when we go over there, it's already and what I noticed, the first thing that I noticed when I went there from being like a boss or a business owner, I was able to see a different perspective is that they had no, they didn't really know what they were doing.
They were reacting to how we would react.
And I found that to be shocking.
You know, it's like, whoa, what is going on here?
Like, there's no protocol.
They're seeing how we would react if we'd get physical, if we'd get violent, if we'd yell.
You understand what I'm saying?
There was that.
You know, there was a lot of people yelling.
I was yelling.
I was yelling at the general, you know, and I was upset.
So he was pretty much the only one that I yelled at.
And I just said, you know, you should have been planning this evacuation.
You know, you should have taken time.
You know, at the time, I just remember him promoting his book and then some of the stuff that had happened with his counterpart was, you know, at the beginning of the remember the name of the general?
Now that I've known more about like the military and people, you know, I wouldn't say so with him.
I would say, you know, what I've noticed with people in the military, and I've just realized this in the last month, is that they look at us like So people that have served, it appears that they treat us like they would want their folks treated if they had lost their lives.
Between the time you spent in Dover receiving your son's remains, staying in the Motel Six with Human Feces on the Wall, between that and this State of the Union earlier this month, had you had any contact with Biden or the White House?
We've never had any contact with the White House or Biden.
And we have reached out or McCall and several people, several families have reached out to, you know, maybe have a roundtable with them, see what they're what they're thinking was, anything, you know, honor us or not honor us, honor our children.
Yes.
Something.
And they just refuse.
I don't know why they hate us so much, to be honest with you.
Very easily, you know, by assuming any kind of responsibility.
Hell, you know, I know people that business owners that assume more responsibility for someone that gets hurt on their job than what he's done for these people.
People that are held more accountable in drunk driving cases than this.
And man, yeah, after three years, this guy, he just doesn't want to say anything about any of these kids.
What happened was when this all happened, we, you know, we didn't have the house.
So, any of the hearings, if you look at any of the Senate hearings that were there, they were all kind of biased.
Like, they all said, Oh, no, this was great.
You know, we did a good job.
Of course, we're going to.
It wasn't until McCarthy became speaker that we actually had an opportunity to get the answers that we needed.
So, last June, we got an opportunity from Daryl Issa to do like a public.
We went, you know, we went to Washington and the premise was like, Look, we don't know what's going to happen, but we're going to introduce you to McCarthy.
We're going to introduce you to Scalise, McCall, and we're going to get you to know because nobody knew our story.
Nobody, you know, it wasn't really out there.
Maybe it wasn't to some degree in like maybe social media or something, because that's probably the only outlet that the parents had, like their Facebook or whatever.
But there's a good portion of Americans that don't even pay attention to that.
So, and I being one of them, I'm not on any of those that I could channel anything.
And so, when this opportunity came, you know, they're like, Look, we don't know what's going to happen.
We don't know if there's anything, but we're going to go down there.
And we're, you know, and every family of the 13 was was invited to this.
Like, here's what we're doing.
It was set up with Sean Reyes from Utah and kind of connected us with these people.
And then it kind of from there went with Daryl Issa.
He was the one that, you know, had been championing everything at that point.
And so, you know, they even had funding for it.
Like, we're going to take the mom and the dad of each child, each service member, whoever wants to come.
And we're going to go down to Washington and see if there's anybody that's interested in anything.
So we went down there.
We met these different offices.
We told them our stories because nobody knew really our stories, you know, what had happened to us in Dover.
And then, really, like the stuff that we were being told.
So they had given us a whole bunch of lies.
You know, people are talking to the kids.
People are talking to everyone that's coming back.
And what the government is telling us is different from what these people that were actually there are saying.
And so we're like, well, they're like, oh, there was no gunfire.
Well, one of the Marines actually killed one of his aggressors.
You know, he like shot him and killed him.
Or I don't know if he killed him.
So to say that there was no gunfire is absurd.
Now, my son, before I sent him or before he went to Afghanistan, I bought him a, when I was a kid, when we were kids, there was that Buck 110 knife that the Duke, the Duke boys had with the bolster on it.
So I bought my son one of those, but a switchblade.
And I said, you know, this is good for fast.
You know, if you need a knife, you know, you can, it's a switchblade.
And I bought him this and he carried it on him.
I have pictures of him in Afghanistan with it.
Well, when the Keiko, which is the casualty assisted coordinating officer, so every time that something happens in the military to your loved ones, you get assigned a Keiko.
And he's basically the liaison between the military and your family.
I mean, everything from A to Z. You know, he's like your best friend.
And so when he had come that night to my house, I had said to him, Hey, look, you know, Nothing else I wanted except for that knife.
You know, I told him, hey, I gave my kid this knife.
And I want that.
I want that back.
And, you know, he can't, he didn't, I just met him like two minutes ago.
And it's all, you know, he listened to me.
Well, on September 17th is when they brought my son his body back.
And so we, you know, it was a very nice, another kind of dignified transfer from Ontario Airport to where we live in Norco.
He's buried like literally less than a mile from my house.
And that whole way, you know, the streets are lined, American flags and people and everything.
And then when we get to the cemetery, he pulls me in the back room and he and he pulls out that knife, you know, and in the case.
And I'm like, just happy.
And for me, it was like, I put so much value in that knife, you know?
Like, for some reason, I felt like if I had that knife, it would eliminate some of my pain that I had.
You know, that's something that we that we shared.
And I give it to him.
And when he handed me the knife, I looked at it and there was a hole right in the front.
And the same, the same case that we had when we were kids.
You know, it's a leather case with a little button.
And I told him, I'm like, hey, Charlie, there's a, wow, there's a hole from one of the BBs.
You know, because IED, little BBs.
And I'm looking at it and I pull the knife out.
And the knife was like, had imploded inside the sheath.
So it was hard to get it out of the sheath.
You know, it was hard.
And when I pulled it out, my gunny was like, he's a gunny.
I think he got promoted.
So don't be upset with me.
But when I pulled it out, he's like, that's not a BB hole.
That's a bullet hole.
And so when I took it home, I got one of my 556 bullets and I got my dial calipers and I started measuring the depth of the hole and then put that depth in relation to the boat tail of the bullet and then measured the diameter.
I got real scientific and you could just pull the bullet right out of the 556 casing and put it fits perfect in there.
It was a five, it's a 556.
And, you know, that's that's proof.
And if it's on the front of his thing, it came from across.
It didn't come from behind.
It's not friendly fire because he didn't put it in his back.
It was right on his front.
They also, they gave you pictures of like where your kid is.
Now, every, you know, maps.
So when they gave you the briefing, when they first briefed the families, they had maps and said, okay, your kid is here.
X marks the spot.
And then you'd ask them, well, who's this guy?
And they're, well, we can't tell you.
But then after that, they told the public, then these, then now all of a sudden, everybody is out there.
But the maps that they gave us were all different.
Like there's three of them.
There's three.
There's three different ones.
But one thing I can say, and the other families' kids are in different locations in those three different maps.
But my son's always on that wall.
Like my son's always in every map right across from the bomber.
Like right across.
There's three kids on that wall and he was one of them.
So there's no, he wasn't turned around.
There's no way it could have been friendly fire.
You understand what I'm saying?
And that was like one of the things.
It was like, well, here, I've got proof.
You know, I've got proof that my kid was, you're going to tell us that, you know, they weren't shot at.
Everybody can hear it on the videos, but, and here's physical proof that I have.
And it's not an AK round.
You know, it's not a, it's not an AK size hole.
It's, it's a perfect, like literally that bullet was probably stuck in there and someone had to like pull it out.
And so fast forward to when we met Daryl Lysa and them in June, I brought that up and showed them that.
And these were some of the things that they used to get the ball rolling, to get interest in it.
So, you know, we've, since June, we've been going to Congress for no other reason but to lobby for our kids, to give information that these congressmen don't have so they can bring in different people and do hearings and get the information that we need.
And we've made like enormous traction.
I mean, just the answers that we've gotten with the hearings that they've had have been good that we have them, that we didn't, you know, we didn't have them before, but is a testament to what a failure this was.
And we've pretty much gone in all avenues.
We've exhausted the military, I believe, at this point.
That, you know, well, you know, the part that they were in charge of was a retrograde.
So there's two parts to it.
There was a retrograde and then the evacuation.
And the retrograde went off unhitched, you know, no problem.
The problem was, was that when you hear people say, well, you should have taken the people out before you take out the military, they should have done the NEO before they did the retrograde.
And that's where the point comes is that the State Department and the administration was in charge of the NEO and the retrograde.
And the only reason why they did the NEO, now they did the NEO, the NEO was implemented by Ross Wilson.
That's another guy.
He's the guy.
After all these nine months of going back and forth, it's not, you know, I don't see it's the generals.
I don't see it's the military.
It's this guy.
He's the guy that initiated the NEO and he did it on August 14th.
I, you know, we got the opportunity that there were other tickets.
Other members had given it to us.
And I wouldn't, you know, I'm sure I had said this of people.
Yeah, I'm going to say something if this guy doesn't say anything.
But when you're there in the greatest country of the world with the most powerful people, I was scared.
Like I was scared, you know, am I going to get killed?
Am I going to commit suicide tomorrow because of this?
You know, who knows, right?
And so, no, at that time, I was just in serious prayer.
You know, I was like praying to the Lord, you know, humble me, soften my heart, you know, let your will be done, you know?
And to be honest with you, when I stood up, when I just heard him say something about kids, at some point he was talking about kids, and then he said something about being safe.
And I just stood up and I didn't even, I didn't even, like the Holy Spirit like got in me and stood up.
And I don't know if you ever had anything like that happen, but like the effects of that had affected me for weeks afterwards, you know, like what, what really happened there?
And when I stood up and I said the first thing I said, I kind of realized I had said it and I paused.
I was like, uh-oh, what did I do?
You know, and then I said, you know, United States Marines and I said his name and I said, you know, 2nd Battalion, 1st Marines.
But I don't even remember saying any of that.
Like, I don't even remember saying any of that.
You know, it just kind of came out.
And if I could back up to why I had went earlier, I was talking about that first State of the Union.
And I got these reporter, you know, and I felt bad for him and I wanted to help.
And I said, all right, well, look what I'll do.
It's my lunch break.
I got an hour lunch break.
On my lunch break, I'm going to watch a State of the Union so that I'll be able to answer appropriately for your interview that you want me to do.
He's all right.
So I watched his interview or I watched his State of the Union, the first one.
And at like 56 minutes, he brings up Afghanistan.
And he did the exact same thing that he always does.
He says, okay, you know, we're never going to, you know, the heroes that we didn't even say 13.
And then one lady in the audience, she's like 13 of them.
I think it was Bobbit or Bobit or she said something now.
And I was, I got goosebumps.
But he then did the same thing.
He went right into Bo.
He went right into his son and he said the existential threat to the military is the burning of diesel fuel in pits because that's, I think, how Bo got his cancer.
And I was just like crying.
I was so devastated.
Like once I was for more than the fact that like when this happens, like I said, like all these cockroaches come out of the woodworks.
Like every media, you know, they want, you know, people, I'm selling this.
Oh, we love you and this.
I didn't get involved in any of it, but I had seen that this was happening all over with a lot of people.
And so a part of me was upset that I had watched this.
All right.
So I'm devastated.
I'm devastated, like, like this, what this president had just done and how he had turned it again.
I mean, can't even say the kids' name.
If he would have said 13 names at that state of the union, we wouldn't even be here right now.
And then the guy's like, no, we ain't going to do it because we have one of the other parents.
And I was like crying even harder.
And so I've had to deal with that for three years with, you know, my God, with my Lord, praying, you know, like, hey, Lord, you know, humble me from this.
Soften my heart from it, you know, like whatever.
So when the opportunity came to go to the state of the union, I'll be honest with you, there was no way I was going to leave that state of the union without my kid's name being said, you know, and I feel like, and but at first I thought that they would say something.
So I felt like it was the Lord telling me, like, here, you know, your reward for being patient and faithful for three years.
I'm going to, I'm going to bless you with this.
You understand what I'm saying?
And then it didn't happen.
You know, it's like it didn't happen.
And I was, I was able to see my other, the other parents.
I was, I found them in the crowds, you know, where they were at.
And just the way that they were looking, the despair and the sadness that they had at that state of the union, everyone was slumped over, just kind of devastated, you know.
And another thing I was like concerned, like, like the state, you would think that the speaker of the house would have the best seats, right?
Like, all right, well, these two families are getting the speaker of the house.
And I was, I remember praying to the Lord, like, Lord, you know, why don't I have those seats?
You know, why don't I have the best seats?
I'm thinking, I don't know that they are.
And then McCall gives up one of his seats, you know, and he's the head of the chairman, right?
So whoever got that, said, oh, Lord, why didn't I get that seat?
You know, and that's all right.
Thank you for the seats that you give.
I don't even know where my seats are, but I'm just assuming.
You know, that's how people do.
You know, we do this.
We do our own assumptions.
As it turns out, the seats I got were like right directly, like I was watching the president, like, you know, right in front of him, like right where he comes out of that tunnel.
I was sitting right above there.
So the Lord had given me like the best seats in the whole world.
And like for the last two weeks, I'm like, oh, Lord, you didn't give me, you know, I don't even know what the seats are, but I'm assuming that they're the worst.
And a lot of this has happened to me in the course of this, you know, by being patient.
I feel like the Lord has blessed me.
And these are the little blessings that I need.
I don't need any praise.
I don't want to put anything on Facebook and then read those comments.
And, you know, asked me, hey, have you gotten any help?
I'm like, no, I don't need any help.
I'm just right now, you know, I'm feeling this way.
And then he had told me that he had told me that, Well, we, you know, if you say something and then we tell you to be quiet and then you don't, then we arrest you again, then we arrest you.
And I said, Well, nobody ever told me to be quiet.
You know, I never, I never was afforded that opportunity.
And then he left.
And then they asked me more questions.
The other kid in the suit, you know, just basic questions, sex, weight, and stuff like this.
And then he came back and he said that again.
And then he said, well, there's two ways.
Like, if we can ask you and then ask you again and arrest you, or we can just arrest you.
And he's all, you don't want to be that because that's a felony.
So I felt like he was kind of throwing me a bone, you know, like, and I kind of picked up on that.
And I was like, well, all right, you know, I appreciate that.
So what happened was, was that, you know, as we're talking and he's telling me this stuff, he says the congressman is outside.
So we, I was invited by Congressman Brian Mast and Brian Mapps bailed me out of jail, like was there.
And he's all congressman's right outside the door.
And I felt like a million dollars because I knew like, all right, I'm all right now.
You know, I mean, I've got the congressman, you know, to help me.
And so, yeah, he got me out and walked me and had met, you know, had met him.
We've met him several times.
He's, there's only, you know, there's, there's four congressmen that I call the four horsemen, and they're military men.
So they understand it's Isa, Mills, Mast, and Waltz.
And then they're all led by the chairman, Michael McCall.
So he's the chair of the House of Foreign Affairs, and he's the one that's able to bring these hearings.
And then these guys are just, you know, they're the ones that we're telling our stories to, and they're helping do whatever they do in Washington to get the message out.
So the fact that he was there meant a lot to me.
Like, like, all right, you know, I'm not because to be honest with you, from what I see on TV, you know, yeah, hey, shake your hand, we love you, but the next day I'll be on my own.
This is my, I'm thinking, you know, I'm like, yeah, I'm going to be all by myself, you know, this is great for tonight, but come the 28th when I've got to go to court, I'm going to be by myself.
But the fact that he was there and, you know, he's a man of God.
And we prayed before, I don't know if we prayed before, but we talked about like what we're talking about in our, in our, the, the spiritual, you know, road that, that I've taken with my son.
And it was, I was just really blessed that he was there and he got me out.
And then when I got out, um, you know, Issa, Waltz, all of them, we're not going to let anything happen to you.
And don't forget, there's tens of thousands of service members who died that don't have, you know, shootery boards at their front doorstep with a knock.
I mean, it was just insane.
Stuff at your front door, cards, we love you, money, checks, you understand?
And every check, every cash I ever got, I still have it.
So I never spent any of that.
And every card that we got, not probably every one of them because it was just too much, but I wrote, you know, back to them.
I remember telling my kids, hey, you know, watch out how you process this and what you do with it because it's going to ruin you and your faith.
Another thing that two other things.
Today is our anniversary where my sons and I got baptized.
We got baptized on March 26, 2017.
And we got baptized together in the same pool.
And in a year, so the other thing is, is that like when you lose someone, like when I lost my mom, I lost my dad within a week.
Like if they died on a Thursday, next Thursday, you'd bury them and that was it.
You know, I mean, you start trying to put your life together.
And this situation didn't really happen.
I mean, it was like five weeks they brought back his body.
And, you know, things come up, certain little things would come up.
Like, I know that they had the and when these things come up, you kind of focus towards that.
So you repress your feelings and everything for this one event, right?
And you're like, okay, well, this event's coming up, and I'm going to, I'm focusing on that.
And one of the events we had in November was the memorial at Camp Pendleton.
Now, since he was, he lived, we live like 45 minutes from Camp Pendleton.
He came home every weekend.
So the only time I never seen him was when he actually deployed, you know, and he'd bring his Marine friends home with him.
And I felt bad because some of them lived in Iowa.
There was no way they could see their family.
So if we could give them a weekend where they felt at home, then I was all for that.
You know, it was kind of like around COVID.
So we were cooking breakfast and couldn't really go to church.
And I had to, sometimes I'd have the TV on with our preacher, our pastor, and they'd play games and they'd do whatever, you know, and my son would take them on hikes and they would drink on Fridays, you know, whatever they, however, they had to unwind, you know, they were able to do it at our house.
And I was, I was blessed that we could provide that for them.
And so we had this memorial for the Marines, right?
And, you know, I never did any interviews or anything.
I didn't want to be, I didn't, that wasn't right for me.
And so I had focused all my heart towards this memorial, which was in November, and surpassed all my feelings and everything.
And, well, I'm just going to focus on that part.
And we went to the memorial and it was beautiful.
And they had the missing man formation with the helicopters that went over the mountain where he would hike over there in Camp Pendleton.
And then, and I think that was either on a Thursday or Friday.
And then on that Sunday, I just, I felt like a lot of remorse.
I felt like grief, you know, and for me, but my religion, which is Christian, isn't, you know, for me to, I felt like for me to display grief is me saying I don't believe in the Lord.
You know, is that weird?
I don't know.
And so I'd never really just had any grief.
I never had any sorrow except for that day.
I remember I was in my master bedroom and it was the Sunday and there was nothing else to look forward to.
There was no other event.
That was the last event.
And I remember just like feeling, you know, immense grief, sorrow.
And I was like, Lord, why am I looking out at the mountains that he would put weights in his rucksack and hike?
And I was like, Lord, you know, why do I have this feeling?
You know, why do I have this?
Why am I feeling this way?
And then he said, hey, the Holy Spirit or the Lord told me, Hey, look at the day that you went to Harvest Festival.
So Harvest Festival.
So we gave our lives to Jesus Christ together.
All right, in this place in Angel Stadium by a fellow named Greg Laurie, who does the same thing that I forgot his name, but evangelical in the 70s.
So they'd go to these stadiums, they'd preach the gospel, and you had an opportunity to give your life to Jesus Christ there.
And a lot of people did this in Billy Graham's things.
He's doing the same thing.
He's been doing it for like 20 years.
So if I could just go back in like 2015, I realized that my kids didn't have the same faith like I did.
You know, like, yeah, I said you need to be Christian.
And once in a while, I would say, but I didn't lead and I didn't tell them about it.
So my kids were already older, you know, so I didn't have a, I didn't have an opportunity to indoctrinate them when they were younger.
These are teenage boys.
And I was praying, you know, Lord, please, you know, I failed.
You know, give me an opportunity.
And he did, you know, Kareem started asking about a church in like in 2015.
We started going.
And I knew that I could tell them, hey, you got to do this, but they, I had to change.
You know, I had to make an a concerted effort to make a change and be sincere with the faith so that they would follow because I can't just tell them something.
You know, I have to lead by example.
And so that transformation happened.
It took a year or something.
And the pastor was like, hey, you know, Greg Lori is having this thing down there.
And we encourage everyone to go.
So I'm thinking, Lord, this is our opportunity.
Thank you.
You know, and they're that we're going to church every weekend, me and my sons, every Sunday.
And we're working through, I'm working through the different things and being real with them.
You know, ties, you know, how do you deal with ties, right?
Like, at first, I was like, I'm not giving them any money, you know?
And my pastor had said something at the time.
He's all like, well, do you guys like?
And this weeks later, he had said, well, do you guys like air conditioning?
And that just, I realized, like, my ties are for the air conditioning.
And it made me.
So I made a point to, yeah, I talked bad about the ties before.
I'm going to make a point to show my kids that, look, I've changed.
I realize.
And we're going to start giving tithes.
So the boys, I would give them their money so that they would know to give tithes.
So every Sunday we would be given our tithes.
And that's just an example of how we worked through some of the obstacles in our faith, you know, and were real about it.
You know, we weren't just saying it, we were acting upon it.
And so we went to Greg Lori's and we all gave our lives to Jesus Christ.
You know, Stephen, Scheiler, Stephen, Kareem, me, Shanna, we all gave our lives to Jesus.
And I felt blessed.
You know, I was like, wow, like this doesn't happen.
You know, I mean, who gets this opportunity?
I failed and then, but I prayed for a solid year, you know, please, Lord, please.
And just such a blessing.
And then from that blessing, you know, we were, we always went to church.
You know, it was, it was became part of our background and me telling and preaching to the boys, you know, you know, about the gospel as well as our pastor.
And then fast forward to that time when I was right after the right after the Camp Pendleton Memorial, the Lord, and I'm looking out in the backyard and I'm feeling grief and I'm just feeling horrible, you know, the first time in like eight months or whatever.
And I'm like, why do I feel this way?
You know, I, I, you know, and the Lord said, Hey, Steve, look at when you went to harvest festival.
That's what it's called.
And we only went on Fridays because Sunday would be, people wouldn't go to church, so they'd go Saturday, same thing.
But Friday would be after work.
So I just knew, like, hey, we went to the first time we went was on Friday, and then every other time we went on Fridays.
So I knew that it was on a Friday and I googled, you know, when was the Harvest Festival?
And it was August 26th of 2017, which is five years to the day.
And like, I got goosebumps and like all my grief went away and it just let me know that the Lord had planned this for me.
And that was verification.
You know, that on August 26th, 2016, we gave our lives to Jesus Christ.
And on August 26th, 2021, he took my son.
And that was, that's pretty powerful, you know, to let me know, you know, and that was just for me.
Like, we had done some events where, you know, they had honored, and Greg Lorry had done that year, had done his Harvest Festival and honored my son.
And he only had one that year.
It was October 3rd or 5th because of COVID.
And they had done a big page thing and they honored my son.
And he didn't know this.
Otherwise, he would have been all over it.
You know, everybody would have been all over that, I would assume.
But that was just for me.
That was just for me, you know?
That the Lord told me that, like, to let me know that you just got to show up.
You just got to show up and I'll take care of everything else.