Oct 21, 2011

Meeting the son, of a scouting friend, at BYU


I had an interesting time serving at BYU for the years from 2006 to 2009 in a Bishopric of the 166th Ward. During that time was able to get to know a number of wonderful youth and leaders. I would always try to be friendly and get to know each of them and their friends. One Sunday was particularly interesting as I was doing the tithing following our main church meetings I had need to ask Bishop some particular questions so I went to the 7th floor where his office was located to ask him the questions.
There were tow of our Sisters sitting there waiting for their turn for an interview and with one of them an obvious boy friend or wanna-be boyfriend I wasn’t really certain. Anyway we had been talking and I discovered that the young man was from Highland and so we talked about friends that I had who were also from Highland, Utah. One of my dear scouting friends was from there. Ren Smith was blind and had been involved in scouting the entire time that I had known him. I had seen him at various council functions and gotten to know him through those meetings. His Brother, Fred, and I had also served with Doug Binks on a Timberline course as assistant scoutmasters together for a couple of years. Ren later asked me to serve with him on a scout woodbadge course as a coach counselor in 1999. He was a Buffalo from woodbadge and so was I which even made it more fun to serve with him and he also broke protocol and asked me to serve a CC to the Buffalo Patrol. I was more than excited to do so. We had a great course and I got to love each of the men in the patrol. There were 12 Buffalo in that course that year as several of the staff were also from the Buffalo patrol of years past.
Well back to the story of this young man. We found out that we both had scouting connections with Ren through scouting and he made the comment that his dad had gone through woodbadge with Ren as the Scoutmaster. Well I quickly put two and two together and figured out that his father had been at that woodbadge course where I served with Ren. I knew that men were only allowed to be a woodbadge Scoutmaster one time so I had to have been there with his father. Then when I told the young man that I had been there and served as the CC for the Buffalo patrol he told me that his father had been a member of that patrol. I asked his fathers name and sure enough he had been one of my patrol. I then remembered a story that his father had told me and related it to him and he confirmed that indeed that had happened to them, The story was of a night when his father awoke to see a young lady standing next to his bed near where he was sleeping. She was dressed in white and simply stood there looking at him for a few moments before leaving. It had wakened him so much that he laid there wondering why she had been there and then decided to check the house. He went down to the kitchen and found the dishwasher had stuck in the dry mode and was so hot that he couldn’t touch it. He quickly turned off the breaker and let it cool down. He related to me that he was sure that had he not found it at that time that there would have been a fire shortly after since the door was so hot that he couldn’t touch it and that the counter was even getting very hot. He was sure that the young lady had been sent to warn him of the danger that he and his family were in at that time. Well the young man then related to me that his sister had also been visited by a man in much the same way but they never did discover why he had been there. It was not the same day as the visit to her father but later.
Well the young man called his father as we talked and asked if he knew a Kent Poulson and he said that he had known me at woodbadge and was his Coach Counselor. The world is so small at times.