There aren’t a lot of 10-year-old kids who can grab the attention in any room. Troy Brock is one of those kids.

“He’s someone who has unlimited energy, and I have found there’s no space big enough for his energy,” Troy’s father Tyler said.

Troy lived near his grandparents in his early years when his dad was a photojournalist with FOX8. Tyler felt a calling to serve and joined the Army, which took him out west to Colorado.

That’s when Troy began to have some issues.

“I did have headaches, and I had anger issues,” Troy said.

His parents Tyler and Samantha began seeing if doctors could find any answers.

“The sleep study said there was something wrong, so we got an MRI,” Tyler said. “The day we found it on the MRI, the doctor and the technician … kind of danced around the word. They would say … ‘mass or tumor.’”

Troy doesn’t dance around it at all. In the opening moments of a video on his new YouTube channel, Troy makes a pronouncement.

“I was diagnosed with brain cancer in 2021. It’s been a hard journey, but I’ve refused to let it define me,” Troy said.

“When the doctor told us about that … I was paralyzed,” Tyler said. “It was hard to hold back the tears. As a parent, you wish you could take everything painful and evil away from your children, and I just felt hopeless.”

What Tyler could do was pick up his camera. He has excellent skills as a photographer and editor, and when Troy got a camper as a gift from the Make-A-Wish Foundation, he knew what he wanted to do: Make videos that would encourage folks to “get out and see God’s creations.”

The entire Brock family are people of faith, which makes sense since grandfather Travis is the pastor of Sandy Creek Baptist Church in Liberty.

It was tough for a man who preaches about the greatness and kindness of God to come face-to-face with something as devastating as childhood cancer. How does he explain that to his congregation?

“It goes back to the fall of man,” Travis said. “We suffer these things because of the sin of man, and Troy didn’t deserve this in our way of thinking. In my faith, I … don’t really get angry. I may question a lot, but I don’t really get angry at God … Health struggles are more common than we realize for people, but it’s part of fallen man. It’s part of who we are. It helps me to see the value of life, but the moral is that none of us is immune to difficult times.”

“We know God’s in control, we really do,” his wife Stacy said.

Troy only has a couple of videos made for his Camping with Cancer YouTube page uploaded, but he plans many more since his ganglioglioma cancer appears to be held at bay for now.

They plan to put treatments on hold in October after two years and see how he does. In the meantime, he plans to add more videos to inspire as many folks as he can.

“It’s really cool to see … how he looks at the positive side of this,” Tyler said.

See some of Tyler’s videos in this edition of The Buckley Report.