My family had moved within a mile of our county’s juvenile detention center. At first glance, I was just glad my kids were not in it! Teens were playing basketball on a court surrounded by impossibly high fences topped with wire. One day as I drove past, though, I thought it would be a great place for a Sunday School class.
Although I was teaching Sunday School at the time, I wrote the board of trustees at my church to ask them to appoint a Sunday School teacher—of course not me!—to have a class at the detention center. (Note: It’s useful to check and see if there are any Christian Science branch churches that have Institutional Committees in your area before moving forward. There were none in my area specifically covering juvenile facilities.) There wasn’t any movement on my request in our church, and we continued on with other things. Several years went by.
One morning I opened our local paper to headlines that a guard at the juvenile detention center had been murdered by an angry group of the juvenile inmates. I sat there stunned. Why had I never prayed for the kids or taught the proposed Sunday School class myself? So I began to pray regularly about the kids at the juvenile detention center, striving to know what God knows about each of His children. And of course it was important to forgive myself for not following through on perceiving the need of help. Now I was actively asking God for an opportunity to establish a Sunday School class at the facility.
