# **clueless old men

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Posted by COMF [COMF] on October 31, 1999 at 05:22:19 {MDPAlM8llY0vgA2d.KEIoRa3VCcycQ}:

In Reply to: *clueless old men posted by jeff on October 30, 1999 at 16:22:25:

I didn't have a father figure in the house when I was a child. A working mother, in the sixties before the days of "equal wages for equal work," my mom spent a lot of time just earning a living, and didn't have much left to devote to us.

I became a cub scout, and then a boy scout. We met twice a month for group activities, and sometimes went camping for a weekend; in the summer we went for an entire week to one of the established boy scout campgrounds. We worked on merit badges, learned how to cook, how to canoe, how to signal in morse code and semaphore, how to administer first aid, how to swim... lots of things we wouldn't have learned sitting at home watching TV. Best of all, for fatherless children, most of the scout leaders were men who cared, who were willing to take a little time and encourage a fumbling, clutzy adolescent and give him much-needed words of praise.

The ministerial servants, including myself, once sat in on a meeting with the elders and the CO. One subject we discussed was how we could help the "fatherless boys" in the congregation. Well, I had the answer to that based on personal experience. I spoke right up, told them all about the one-on-one attention, the talks around the campfire when the darkness hid our faces and made it seem safe to ask scary personal questions about puberty, sex, and becoming an adult; about the feeling of having an experienced father-figure teaching me things I needed to know to become a man myself.

They sat there and waited patiently for me to finish. Their eyes glazed over; a couple of them looked embarrassedly away, as though they were ashamed to have the CO see that they had a ministerial servant here in their congregation who thought boy scouts had good points to it. When I was done, the CO said, "Thank you," and another elder began speaking about how they might consider choosing the fatherless boys to ride in their cargroups in service.

COMF

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