Last weekend, I accompanied Tom on his first Boy Scout overnight. Saturday morning, we piled some twenty kids into a half dozen cars and headed out to a county park to spend twenty-eight quality hours communing with nature and practicing Scouting skills. An interesting thing happened as our boys, who a couple of weeks earlier had been in Cub Scouts, emerged into the outdoor adventure that is Boy Scouting. They did stuff on their own with very little help from adults.
I found it astounding when we arrived at the campground that the older boys in the troop took charge of the whole matter. Once the Scoutmaster parked his truck and unhitched the trailer, the adult role in the weekend pretty much came to an end. The Senior Patrol Leader and the other teens set to work unloading tents and stoves and the like. They helped the dozen new boys find suitable camping sites. They reminded them how to set their tents up.
Throughout the day, various boys would approach their dads complaining about this or that. And what did the dads do? We sent the boys off to their Patrol Leaders for help.
Now don’t get the idea that we simply left the boys to their own devices all weekend while we sat around the fire playing gin rummy. We did make sure that the boys weren’t doing anything dangerous or immoral. We tempered their language a few times and broke up a couple of mild scuffles, but largely we sat back and chit-chatted all day Saturday. When it came time for the boys to cook dinner, we stayed away from them and fixed our own dinner, reheated chili from a fundraiser a few weeks earlier. The boys fussed and muddled and burned a few things. In the end, Tom declared his meal—burgers and assorted side dishes—to be the best meal he’d ever eaten.
There’s something to be said for your kid needing you, but there’s something even better to be said for your kid striking out on his own and relying on himself and on God. After a few of these campouts, Tom and his fellow first-year Scouts will be pretty well self-sufficient. They’ll know how to pack and how to set up camp. They’ll be the ones loading the trailer and teaching new kids how to do things right. That’s a good prospect.
Isaiah looks forward to a day of changing dependency as well. Instead of a son starting to rely on himself instead of his dad, however, Isaiah looks for Israel to stop depending on worldly help and to start depending fully on God.
One of these days, Tom will be feeling himself quite independent, quite capable of taking care of himself in all situations. When that happens, though, you can bet that something will arise that makes him realize that his independence and his reliance on friends is an illusion. He’ll still be looking to me for help for many years. I’m fine with that.
This weekend began a good process of coming of age. My prayer is that Tom will learn to function for himself, realizing that he can always rely on me and, even more so, on God. That’s my prayer for myself, too, a prayer that hasn’t yet been answered 100%.
Tune My Heart is primarily an aid to the devotional life of its author, Mark Browning, who holds the copyright for this material. It is provided online in hopes that some will find it edifying. All contents, unless otherwise noted, may be redistributed freely provided that you give credit for its origin and do not charge anything.