Scouting is one of our society’s great organizations. It is dedicated to giving young men a helping hand on their journey to maturity. Perhaps it was already too late for Laman and Lemuel. Perhaps they had already been too soiled by their exposure to the wickedness of the Jewish society of their day. Perhaps Laman and Lemuel would have turned out that way anyway. But to remove a youth from the source of the contamination might have been just what Sam and Nephi needed at their exceedingly young age. To be taken out into the wilderness where their major source of influence was a prophet of God and not a corrupt society and the peer pressures of that environment, would be a primary reason for Lehi spending eight years in the wilderness with his teenage sons.

I enjoyed my scouting years. Many of life’s lessons come during scouting outings where the youth is often taken from society and back to a simpler surrounding where life is reduced to its bare essentials of surviving, life, youth, and mentor. Nephi’s mentor was obviously his father. Laman and Lemuel’s mentor was obviously not Lehi. They had replaced looking up to their father with their love for the things of the world. Before the things of the world blinded Sam and Nephi, and while they where still looking up to dad, Lehi took his family into the wilderness of the Red Sea. Their daily life there would be one of a continual scouting trip. There survival was more important than the things of the world. It was a simpler environment, not crowded by the things of the world and the corruption of the Jewish society of their day.

Not always obvious at the time, the relationship developed through the time spent together one on one working, playing and in a wilderness environment, is often what ties a father to son in ways that do not occur in any other way. As Nehpi did not include some such daily activities that he would have experienced with his father Lehi, does not mean that they did not occur and that they did not have their needed spiritual influence. What it means is that Nephi like us has taken such too much for granted and have not taken notice of how important it is to have such events and relations in our lives. Nephi said he was born of goodly parents and that Lehi would care for and instruct his family with all the love of a tender parent, but that’s not the same as noticing the importance of the little things and the times and events spent together developing such important relationships.

But the Lord knows how important scouting is. He had Lehi remove his family from Jerusalem toward the end of the first year of the reign of King Zedekiah. And they remained there in the wilderness of the Valley of Lemuel raising their teenage family of sons until Jeremiah was imprisoned in the 8^th or 9^th year of Zedekiah, and then they where there until their sons where married. What would Lehi do in the wilderness with a family of teenage boys for eight years? He would have raised them, and one of them was Nephi, the youngest one. And with the youngest of his first four sons he succeeded, he raised a prophet of God. Also with Sam, Jacob and Joseph he succeeded.