Connecting Elder Kearon’s BYU Education Week talk to the Scouting life

Last week, Elder Patrick Kearon of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles stood before more than 15,000 people at BYU Education Week and said something that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.

“My wish is that you and I might slow down and turn more easily and comfortingly to Christ, and bask in His promised peace. Please, please slow down. Be still and wait for the Spirit of the Lord.”

He was talking to high achievers. People who show up to Education Week on their spare time because they can’t stop learning, growing, and doing. People who measure a lot – including, sometimes, their own worth – by what they’ve accomplished.

He could have been talking about some Scout leaders I know (and me).

Because if there is a community of people in the Latter-day Saint world who are quietly, persistently over-committed – who run programs, lead campouts, recruit families, organize Courts of Honor, and then go home and wonder if they’re doing enough – it’s the Scouting community ; )

We are, almost by definition, a community of doers.

The Fitbit Paradox in a Scouting Context

Elder Kearon described what he called the “Fitbit paradox” – the way measuring every activity can turn meaningful things into transactional work. When everything becomes a metric, everything becomes a task. And when everything is a task, nothing is sacred.

Scouting has advancement. It has rank requirements, merit badge checklists, and Wood Badge tickets. Those structures are good – they give the program shape and give Scouts & Scouters meaningful goals to pursue.

But any Scout leader who has sat across from a parent who wants to know exactly how many more requirements their child needs before they make Eagle – who has felt the subtle pressure of treating a Court of Honor like a production deadline – that leader knows the Fitbit paradox from the inside.

Elder Kearon said it plainly: “Achievement for the sake of achieving does not result in a lasting peace.”

And then he asked a question that stopped me cold: “Can we be at peace just being peaceful?”

Can a Scout leader sit around a campfire on a Friday night – not planning the Saturday schedule, not tracking advancement, not mentally organizing next month’s program – and simply be there? Present. Quiet. Grateful.

That’s harder than it sounds for people who have made productivity a way of being.

What the Savior Modeled – and What Scouting Can Teach

Here’s the grace in Elder Kearon’s message.

He didn’t say STOP doing. He said learn to interweave doing with BEING. “We can learn from the Savior’s examples of how to interweave work with peaceful contemplation.”

Jesus did both. He healed & taught and served with extraordinary energy. He regularly withdrew to pray, to be alone with Heavenly Father. The rhythm wasn’t an accident. It was discipline. He knew that the doing required the being, and that being without doing was incomplete.

This is something Scouting actually understands.

The campout isn’t just a program delivery mechanism. It’s a withdrawal from the noise. The trail isn’t just a fitness activity. It’s a place where the soul quiets down because the body is fully occupied, the screens are gone, and the stars come out.

The best Scouting moments are the unplanned ones. The ones nobody scheduled. The ones that happen in the margin between the requirements and the advancement records.

Elder Kearon said that “our discipleship, in fact, needs both service and stillness.”

Scouting, at its truest, offers both. The problem is that we too often show up for the service and skip the stillness – filling every moment with program, advancement, and next steps, until the thing that made Scouting sacred in the first place gets buried under the weight of running it.

Do your best. Show up faithfully. Run the program well. And then – at the campfire, on the trail, in the quiet at the end of a troop meeting when the folding chairs are stacked, and the kids have gone home – let yourself be still.

Sitting with Christ is not less than serving Him. It is, in fact, what all the serving is supposed to be preparing us for.