Did a girl's picture at the Youth Study Center today. The YSC is a juvenile holding center for young people awaiting their court case or placement. It is a "high security" place. Every Monday we are allowed to go up on the units, where the girls live, and spend time with the girls until they go down for supper. We can't get in until 3:45, after the supervisors change shifts. The chaplain at the YSC is a born again Christian, and we come in under his permission.

Anyway, the girl's name was Shawn. She had beautiful big eyes and a cross with Jesus on it hanging around her neck.

“That's a nice necklace you have," I said as I was drawing her head

"Thanks," she responded immediately. "A girl that was leaving here gave it to me."

"Do you know why Jesus was hanging on that cross?"

"To save us," she said after hesitation.

"Yeah? From what?"

"Well, that's what I'm not sure of."

"He died to save us from our sins.”

"That's what I don't understand," she caught me up. "If Jesus died to save us from our sins, why is there still sin?"

"Because God made us with the freedom to choose or else we'd be robots. Sounds like you've done a lot of thinking."

"Yeah," she said. "This place makes you think."

“Oh? Why?”

"Well," she explained, "before, I was out on the street - and I was only interested in one thing and that was stayin' out on the street. But here I don't have any of my friends -all everybody thinks about here is leaving."

Shawn has such a sweet spirit. It's like she is using God's grace to respond in the proper way to the authority of the Youth Study Center. She says she has never prayed and turned her life over to God but she does read the Bible, especially Exodus "where God kept hardening Pharaoh's heart."

“But he finally learned," she said. She knew John 3:16 by heart. I usually print it out on all my portraits, putting the person's name in the place of "whosoever." She wanted me to draw her cross.

Didn't go to the Southwest Philly club tonight because the car was in the garage and we had to pick it up.