Recent Events

We've had a couple of noteworthy events (both good and... questionable) over the last week that I've been wanting to post about. I'm just now finding the chance to do it.

Last Wednesday we had a Court of Honor. I'm still not quite sure what to think about it. A couple weeks beforehand, one of the Scouts asked me if he could be in charge of this one. I thought it was a great idea, and invited him to our committee meeting so we could help him work it out. He didn't come. Neither did our committee chairman, or any of our committee members. It was just the leaders of the different programs.

The Sunday before the Court of Honor I found out why this young man wanted to lead this event. He had a hiking staff he was making for our Scoutmaster and wanted to present it to him. I thought that was wonderful. Here we had a young man who recognized the hard work his leader was putting in and wanted to do something about it. Great!

The night of the Court of Honor, I started to see a different picture emerge. I was content to sit back and let the boys do what they had planned and lead the meeting. Instead, Scoutmaster's Wife took charge of the entire thing. She assigned boys to specific jobs, she wrote out the agenda, she even interrupted the young men and wouldn't let them speak. She was in charge. It really made me wonder if she hadn't planned the entire recognition for her husband and told the boys they had to do it. (It also really  makes me wonder about her two sons who are Eagle Scouts...) The entire evening was, frankly, embarrassing.

That event, and a few advancement issues beforehand, simply served as a reminder to me about how broken things seem to be with our scouting program, especially our committee. It was terribly frustrating.

On a more positive note, we had a really nice weekend with our older boys. The bishop got tickets to the Priesthood session of the LDS Church's General Conference. We took five of our older boys to Salt Lake to see the session on Saturday night in the Conference Center. We then got into the Tabernacle for the Sunday morning session before heading back home. It was a really great experience, one I wish we could have shared with more of our young men.