As We Teach The Boys: “Do Your Best”

“Do your best” is the motto of the Cub Scouts and we often have to remind to boys of it as they get frustrated with difficult activities and skills. Doing your best is Biblical principle as well. “Whatever you do, do with all your heart, as for the Lord.” (Col. 3:2)

Doing our best is both all we can do and, at the same time, quite limited. If we could always do right, always do things perfectly, we would do that and not have to worry about doing a our best effort, because we’d just do it right and be done with it. But we often don’t do things right. It’s very frustrating knowing it’s not right, when that’s what we want to do. As the scriptures say say, “We all stumble in many ways.” (James 3:2). Another translation has it this way, “We all make many mistakes.”

So we are limited to “doing our best” because that’s all that we can do. We can’t do any better than that no matter how much we want to. We can’t do better than our best, whether it is right or not. We can only hope to grow and do better in the future.

So we do as best we can by our families, neighbors and brethren. We love and help as we can and those of goodwill love in return as they try to do the same as well. We don’t love because others are perfect, and that’s not why God loves us, either. 

We should all be so glad to love isn’t based on perfection, but based on relationships, and each of us trying to be good to one another.