I'd like to talk with you today about missed
opportunities. We have our aims and goals
in all that we do and yet, we often miss opportunities to achieve those
aims. The aim of Scouting is to build
the character of our young people. The
method of doing this advocated by our founder, Lord Baden-Powell, was to have
this development of character come from within the boy rather than from
without. We do this by putting the boys
into situations where we can observe them and interact with them as they
challenge the world. This is the reason
that we take our boys to summer camp. As
we observe our boys in action we see them do things that we are very proud
of. These are the moments that we must treasure
and for which we must offer praise.
But what about the other opportunities;
the times when they do things that we are not so proud of. Sometimes we miss these opportunities. When our boys do something that we'd rather
they didn't do, we let our natural disappointment get in the way of this
opportunity to help our Scouts grow. We
fail to react. We make excuses. We fail
to set limits. We fail to counsel. We let an opportunity to help a boy grow, to
set a boy back on the road to adulthood slip away. The saying, "Boys will be boys,"
can either be an excuse to ignore misdeeds and do nothing or it can be the
opportunity to forge another link in the chain of character built on the
principles of the Scout Oath and Law.
When boys do the things that boys will do, use that time
to gently put them back on the right path.
After all, this is why we took them into the woods in the first
place. To have fun was their
reason. Our reason is to build character.