The Eagle Instinct

Turns out a car accident Thursday morning was more instructive for me about my son than a conversation we had a few months ago about a camp out.

The conversation came about sometime before my son's Eagle Scout court of honor. He was speaking to me in the car about acamping trip he would be attending with other scouts when he casually mentioned it wasn't going to be as good as he had hoped because he forgot to bring his air soft gun.

The comment upset me because he was on the precipice of receiving the highest honor for a scout and seemed more concerned about playing guns with his friends. I thought he should have been more mature about the camping trip and, if he didn't need to work on anything himself, use it as an opportunity to help younger scouts in his troop.

Fastforward to yesterday.

We were driving down Highway 6 on our way home from seminary when we saw a dumptruck sideswipe a small pickup truck. The truck skidded off the road and into the median where it flipped and landed upside down on the other side of the highway.

The accident happened right in front of us. I slowed down a pulled over to the shoulder of the road, and Paul immediately said, "let's go help," while reaching for the door handle. I had to tell Paul to slow down.

There was no way I was going to let him run across three lanes of traffic on a dark highway to save a person who was already climbing out the window of the truck. It quickly became obvious that our help was not needed, and we continued our drive back home.

The whole situation, however, left me extremely impressed about my son's first instinct to run to the assistance of somebody in need. It made me grateful for the things he learned in scouting. And it proved to me that those things actually had taken a hold of him and become a part of him.