Who here has been guilty of telling a fish story… I know I have plenty of them. As friends, we enjoy telling these stories and reacting to them around the camp fire. With each story telling the size of the grizzly bear gets larger and larger along with the size of the rapids that flipped our raft. We enjoy them because they are funny, and nobody is fooled into thinking that it really happened that way.

But some people tell fish stories all the time, They’re not usually funny stories around the campfire. In fact, they’re really lies. I call them minnows and whoppers.

You may have heard of the term “little white lie”. These are the minnows. They may seam harmless and insignificant in the beginning but in the long run can add up to be a whopper. For example, while completing your tenderfoot fitness requirements, It’s not going to hurt anything to say you did 5 more push ups than you actually did… right. The most damage done is to your own character. A scout is trustworthy, right? Each time that we tell a minnow, it gets easier and easier to do so. At the same time it becomes easier to tell a whopper of a story. These big lies are the ones that have the chance of hurting somebody.

The best thing is to stick to the truth. Minnows, just like the real ones in the pond, have a way of growing into whoppers.