Scouting matters

Scouting matters to cub scouts doing a good deed to earn their Bobcat badge. Or when singing Christmas carols to the elderly in a county nursing home, and learning that you can feel better about yourself by helping other people feel better about themselves.

Scouting matters when building a pinewood derby car that lost, then building another that won.

Then learning that no one ever learned anything from winning.

Scouting matters to the elderly and poor like collecting wheelchairs and food door-to-door for needy people.

Learning that needy people can be a lot like us sometimes.

Or serving food at church fund raisers, and learning that the best classroom in the world can be attended while listening to an elderly person.

Scouting matters on weekend campouts with your friends. There you learned that you need to let your friends help you, to let them know that you need their support and that you’re not always as strong as you look or act. And that no matter how serious you life has become you are always going to need someone to act goofy with. Scouting matters to kids who could be tempted to make poor choices without their scouting buddies to bounce things off of.

Scouting matters while life-long friendships are forged.

Scouting matters when you go to meetings each week and recite the scout oath and law so often that you become the embodiment of those principles. If you tell yourself something often enough you become it. Scouting matters because the kind of adults our children will become is directly related to the kind of children we continually told them they were.

Scouting matters when you take on a challenging community service project that seems overwhelming at first, then you learn what you are actually capable of and earn respect for your accomplishments and for yourself.

Seemingly insignificant events like these turned the ordinary into the extraordinary. Events that turned challenge into achievement. Events that literally defined your character and turned you into a responsible adult. All because Scouting matters.

In the end Scouting has taught me that it’s not about earning your Eagle Scout badge or the Silver Beaver, everyone wants to live on top of the mountain, but all the happiness and growth occurs while you’re climbing it. So success in life is in the journey, not the destination.

Scouting matters to me and everyone in this program. What you do that one hour each week matters. It matters to our community, it matters to the boys and it matters to you.

Many of you know that I have spent my entire adult life caring for the elderly. I have learned that failing health is a great equalizer among men. When they are laying in that nursing home bed and I am holding their hand helping them to pass, at that moment, it matters little about the size of their bank account, the kind of car they drove, or how nice their house was. Material possessions have no memory in death. What they all want to know at that moment, is did they make a difference on this earth? Did what they traded the days of their life for, in some way matter?

So I say to each of you volunteers and professionals when you are drawing your final breath, let me tell you now, you can go assured knowing that what you did with your life mattered. And those of you out there reading this who are looking to make a difference in this world, join scouting through www.beascout.org and volunteer. Scouting matters because what you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.

Thank you for giving me the chance to help create that tapestry. Yours in scouting,

Benjamin Pearce Heritage District Chairman

Warwick