Our next award is for growth in Venturing, recognizing a crew member who has most demonstrated improvement in the past year. Please join me in welcoming this year’s winner, David Jeffrey.
David has been with us a couple of years and honestly, all of the adults could spent the evening talking about him and our experiences.
For the past year he has been the chaplain’s aide and previously served as treasurer. He was a good treasurer and a great chaplain’s aide. His maturity and speaking skills are unusual for someone his age.
His devotions are succinct, relevant and well prepared. He’s a smart young man, polite and extraordinarily responsible.
So I’m tempted not to mention his projectile vomiting when he has eaten dairy, or his hording of food, say baked beans, and yes he will say he was just getting his seconds with his firsts. Let’s just say don’t go behind him in line.
And that raises another point. David copes with a condition that requires him to avoid gluten, in other words, anything made with wheat. If you stopped to think about it and you won’t if you don’t have this disease, lots of things at restaurants and cafeterias include gluten.
So the officers when planning menus for trips try to consider him and devise alternatives. And because cross contamination can be just as big an issue, he also sometimes has to cook by himself.
But he doesn’t complain. And he usually pitches in to help others at anything. During our raft trip, the adults observed David helping out at all sorts of times, whether he was asked or not.
As far as I know, David is working on his Eagle rank with us. And I have no doubt he will make it. He’s a good leader who thinks of others.
One of my greatest pleasures as an Advisor has been watching youth grow. Not physically but emotionally and intellectually, into the fine young men and women they are destined to become. David’s growth in the past year has been just such a treat.
For all of those reasons, I am proud to declare David as our 2016 recipient of the Growth in Venturing Award.
Congratulations!