Chance meeting changes troubled teenager’s life
Rena Shook remembers the moment when she realized her foster child, Robert Scott, had accepted God into his life and she saw the changes in him.
Scott, 19, has had a tough road, but things began to look up when he moved in with Shook, 65, three years ago.
She introduced him to Faith Memorial Church in Lancaster, where he saw a familiar face: youth Pastor Aaron
Green, also a volunteer chaplain with Central Ohio Youth for Christ’s Juvenile Justice Ministry.
When Scott was 14, his propensity to run away from his home where he lived with his mother and a stepfather, who tended to mistreat him when his mother was asleep or away, got him picked up by the police. It happened one too many times and the last time, he was taken to the juvenile detention center in
Lancaster, Multi-county Juvenile Detention Center.
He only spent two weeks at the center, but said it felt like two months. While he was there he went to a voluntary Bible study to avoid sitting bored in his cell.
He was the only kid who paid any attention to what Green, who was there as part of the Juvenile Justice Ministry that has been at work in the Lancaster detention center since 2004, was saying.
God didn’t click for Scott until much later on, though he and Green realize their first meeting was likely divine intervention. Faith Memorial Church is just two blocks from the juvenile detention center, but it took years before Green and Scott met again, something Green said is very rare.
“It just reminds me how much God is in control, how he arranges our encounters and how he works in the long term,” Green said. “In life we never know the difference we’re going to make as we move along.”
Steve Telfer, ministry leader of Central Ohio Youth for Christ’s Juvenile Justice Ministry, agreed with Green. The ministry just has one chance to reach kids in detention, but Telfer said it’s often there, where their defenses are down and they’re away from bad influences, that they are most open to listening.
Only 14% of kids don’t go back into detention for a second time, but Scott managed to stay out after his first time.
“You don’t see this change a whole lot, but when you do see it, it just keeps
you plugging for the next one,” Telfer said. “It keeps giving you that hope.”
Scott remembers when he saw Green for the second time. He was sitting at the church with Shook, feeling a little out of place. He didn’t know anyone and was nervous to interact with the other young people there.
“I was skeptical to hang out with the other kids, I didn’t know them … I remember I was sitting with Rena and I was talking to her and I was like ‘I know him,’” Scott said.
Shook added that she had to nearly drag Scott to church that first time, but seeing Green there made him feel a little
more comfortable.
That was just the start of a great relationship between Scott, Green and the church.
Soon, Scott started paying attention to the Sunday sermons and the meaning behind them.
“I love coming Sundays when the pastor talks because he hits home with a lot of stuff … It feels like he’s talking to one person,” Scott said. “For the longest time I could never forgive my mom. I just couldn’t. And that next week he was talking about forgiveness and understanding and it really hit home because at that time I was really not forgiving anybody.”
Scott told Shook how he felt.
“It did open his eyes and he looked at me when he left and he said … ’How did he know?’ and I said ‘Well, that’s how God talks to you,’” Shook said. “It really hit home for him with a lot of things, it brought a lot of good out in Robert.”
Scott has since forgiven his mom and talks to her often.
Green, too, noticed a change in Scott and his faith. Scott’s aunt, the only person in his life he’d ever been to church with before Shook, died in January 2019.
“That was Robert’s first big test of his faith,” Green said. “We have an altar at our church and people come down and pray at the altar for their needs ... I remember Robert coming down to pray. That moment he made the decision to allow the Lord to be lord of his life.”
Previously, Green said Scott had been a really angry kid. He had moved around a lot as a child, run away a lot and was in several foster homes before he found a true home with Shook.
Losing his aunt made him angry, too, Green said. But, instead of hanging on to the anger, he pursued the Lord’s healing, Green said.
“He has done so much that nobody ever thought we would see,” Shook said.
Today, Scott is primed to move out on his own and has a job packing whiskey. He is in both the church and men’s choir, graduated high school as close to honors as he could after not caring about school for his first three years and dreams of building a life with his girlfriend.
It’s a much different, brighter place than Scott was in just a few years ago.
“To be honest I thought I’d be dead before I was 19,” Scott said. “Just the stuff I’ve been through and I’ve seen and gone through.”
But, at the church, “I found hope.”