Healing the Orphan Spirit in Children
As a children’s minister, my heart is to create an environment where kids can encounter and connect with their heavenly father and experience His love for them.
From time to time, I encounter children who struggle to connect with their Papa God - kids who have experienced trauma, rejection, and deep pain. It’s like the very ones who need the healing touch of the Holy Spirit seem to have a wall around their wounded hearts. A God connection is the most important element to healing and yet, because of the hurt, making that connection becomes challenging.
I have been on a quest to learn everything I can about releasing children from these self-protective walls and into their true identities and destinies - because we know that our Father is a Rescuer, Restorer, Redeemer, who goes to every length to draw all of us into His heart!No matter the reason for these walls, or how thick or thin they seem to be, the answer is the same: Children need to EXPERIENCE, over and over again, the PRESENCE of the Holy Spirit. Through the manifest Presence, the Father releases His love, strength and power. Children can hear FOR THEMSELVES that they really are loved and accepted and encounter the Father’s love shown through Jesus Christ.
Teaching kids to “be good” will do little to melt protective walls of wounded hearts. Grace teaches it’s not our behavior, but who loves us, that defines us. God encounters melt away the walls, suddenly or little by little, and enable the breakthrough to come from the inside out as the Father reveals life and destiny for even the most broken.
The answer to an orphan spirit- the inability to believe that you are deeply and completely loved - is found in the Father. Through His love, the spirit of adoption is released and even the most wounded discover that Father doesn’t come to correct, reject, or just to visit from time to time, but He makes His home inside their hearts to stay.
“Can a woman forget her nursing child, and not have compassion on the son of her womb? Surely they may forget, yet I will not forget you. See, I have inscribed you on the palms of my hands; your walls are continually before Me.” Isaiah 49:15, 16
“And I will pray the Father, and He will give you another Helper, that He may abide with you forever – the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees Him nor knows Him; but you know Him, for He dwells with you and will be in you. I will not leave you orphans; I will come to you.” John 14:16-18
Jenni Means is the Children’s Pastor of Northlands Church in Norcross, Georgia. She has been in Children’s Ministry for over 30 years and has a passion to see children encounter the Father’s love and be released into their true identities as sons and daughters, even from an early age. She travels internationally training children’s ministers, works with missionary kids and ministers to parents and children within the adoption community.