Advice and Prayers for troubled kid

12-03-2011 | self

[Salvation]

Have you ever heard of Teen Challenge?

It’s like a boot camp for kids like your son. When they come out then, they do service work under supervision.

[Last Conservative in MoCo]

Because you kind people seem to truly care, I thought it would be right to tell you what’s going on.

My son, his father, and I met with the county juvenile authorities a month ago. We brought a lawyer. The lawyer was initially not too optimistic, but after he reviewed the material I brought with me, he felt a lot better about our prospects. I brought letters of recommendation from my boy’s Scoutmaster (recently-retired military), his former employer, various teachers, his JROTC drill sergeant, as well as his commendations, awards, medals, and honors, and a news item about the time he saved a child’s life.

My son is not usually a good speaker, but he made an excellent presentation (we can thank the JROTC training for that!) As I feared, the social worker didn’t like the whole guns/Army vibe, but she observed accurately that my son seemed to have realized with a shock that this was not a video game; he wasn’t playing “Call of Duty” here, but was facing personal disaster. My ex-husband and I were also questioned at length and our answers were satisfactory.

So the juvenile people recommended to the state’s attorney that my boy be placed on probation for three months and perform 40 hours of community service. This will not affect his enlistment at all. The state’s attorney had 30 days to reject the recommendation, and 30 days has passed, so I thought I could go ahead and post this.

He’s had a bad scare. I hope and pray that it’s enough to wake him up. My concern is that after he turns 18 in awhile I won’t have much control over him and that he’ll go back to hanging around with the friends who contributed to this mess. Kind of hoping he’ll be able to go into the service instead.

Thank you all for your prayers!

Now, back to self-examination and some prayers of my own.