Shiloh Place Ministries
Seeing The World Experience the Father's Healing Love
Through the Hearts of the Leaders
www.shilohplace.org

Exposing the Roots of the Spiritual Orphan Part 1

For the first fourteen years of my daughter Sarah's life, rarely was she able to receive me as her father ­ her safe place where she could receive affection, affirmation, security, comfort, and protection. As a result of my own wounded heart, I was a stoic, intense, and harsh authoritarian father who demanded obedience but had very little ability to provide expressed love and nurture, even though I loved my children deeply. In her early years, Sarah responded with a strong will, independence, and often defiance. Her adolescent years only amplified the issues. Then, in November 1995, I had a personal revelation of Father's love. My character was radically transformed in less than an hour. Trisha said that my personality changed more at that moment than in the previous 15 years altogether in the Lord. I went from an impatient father who did not have the ability to be intimate with my children to a gentle, comforting, and affectionate dad.

Following my change in heart, Sarah skeptically watched to see if my transformation would last. I still made mistakes, but instead of making excuses like I had done in the past, 90% of the time I would eventually come to her with a humble heart and ask her forgiveness for misrepresenting the Father's love. It took several months before Sarah would risk opening her heart to me, but as she did, our relationship steadily improved over the next three years. As she began to more freely receive my affection, love, and parenting, she became softer and less defiant. She began developing a sense of value and respect for me as I acted more like a father and she more like a daughter. But you can legally be a son or daughter, live in a home of perfect love, yet choose not to receive the love or the parenting! Just ask the prodigal son and his older brother (Luke 15)!

Even in this newfound intimacy Sarah and I shared, I began to see a relational pattern in her life. When everything was going good, she was able to receive my love and admonition. But when things went wrong at school, church, or home, she would often close her spirit to me and isolate herself, even though I may have done her no wrong. She would go from being my joyful and chatty daddy's girl to acting like a withdrawn and somber orphan. She would live her life as if she did not have a loving and affirming home, a safe place where she constantly heard her mom and dad tell her that she was the child whom they loved and in whom their favor rested. How many of Father God's children live their lives in similar ways ­ constantly struggling with feelings of rejection, independence, isolation, or oppression? Too often, they live their lives as if they do not have a home or a loving Father!

To a Christian, home is where we can constantly hear the voice of our Father saying, "You are the child I love and in whom My favor rests!" When we feel we are truly at home in the Father's love, we do not constantly struggle with fears, anxieties, insecurities, lusts, addictions, compulsions, or aggressive striving. When we do not feel at home, secure and at rest in the Father's love, it becomes very easy to live our lives as if we do not have a home. We are left feeling like a spiritual orphan ­ feeling that we do not have a safe and secure place in the Father's heart where He protects us, affirms us, provides for us, expresses His love to us, a place where we belong.

Follow the 12-step progression of the underlined points and see how they may apply to your life. As a child, Sarah began to (1) focus upon the faults she saw in me. She did not understand that my attitudes and actions that were misrepresentations of love to her often came from my own unhealed issues and the hidden core pain from my youth. My surfacing pain was not about her, yet she received it as personal rejection and this left her (2) disappointed, discouraged, and wounded. As a result of her pain and judgments, she (3) lost basic trust in parental authority.

Basic trust does not mean the ability to believe or trust one another. It is the capacity to hold your heart open to others, especially if you believe another's motives or intentions are not pure. Basic trust is having an open heart. It is when you risk being vulnerable, even when it hurts you to stay open and not to close your spirit. Basic trust is when you are able to move beyond the weaknesses in others, receive God's healing touch one moment at a time, and not run away. You are able to risk being childlike again and receive love and nurture. Basic trust is foundational for building healthy relationships. Without basic trust, especially toward those in authority, relationships easily become dysfunctional: "I do not trust you enough to talk about my feelings." If you do not have basic trust, you may battle with pride, fears, independence, and control, thus finding great difficulty in receiving love and comfort from God and others. Intimacy is lost!

As God was restoring our family, Sarah began having a measure of trust restored toward me; yet, when she was receiving rejection from others in daily life, there was still a (4) fear of submission to receiving love, comfort, and admonition from me. Love, comfort, and healthy admonition are all part of healthy relationships and are things to which we must be willing to submit. Submission is a Latin word that means, "to place yourself underneath and to push up at the same time." Submission is having an open heart which enables us to be close, vulnerable, and honest in our relationships. Submission is an act of humility and receiving that releases God's grace and abilities in our lives and helps free us from our fears and insecurities with relationships (1 Peter 5:5-7). Because Sarah had been hurt earlier in life by my misrepresentation of Godly, loving authority, her fear of submission resulted in (5) a closed spirit toward me during her time of need. She felt that she could not risk being vulnerable and keeping her heart open to me. This led to (6) an independent spirit: "I subconsciously cannot trust you to help me, so I would rather handle everything myself."

Independence often causes us to hide or deny our pain, so we begin (7) controlling our relationships with anger, passivity, isolation, or "news/sports/weather" games. Our (8) relationships become superficial as we fear truly opening our hearts to people because we fear being hurt again. Nobody really knows us. We especially keep our distance from those in authority or from the very ones who may be able to help us by providing comfort, wise counsel, love, acceptance, and/or belonging. We may find ourselves with (9) very little healthy, supportive, and affirming relationships around us. We end up feeling alone and isolated, even around friends and family. We have fallen into the ungodly belief of (10) living life like a spiritual orphan.

We are left feeling that we have no safe place, no one to care for our soul, no one we can trust to affirm and admonish us, no place to belong and be protected. So the spiritual orphan (11) begins to find comfort and identity in one or more of the following counterfeit affections: possessions ­ finding security in money or things; passions ­ addictions or compulsions to alcohol, drugs, food, immoral issues, etc.; position ­ finding acceptance by striving to be seen or slaving for the praise of man; power ­ being in control of your own life and destiny.

The end result is (12) a person who finds great difficulty receiving love, acceptance, and admonition from God and/or from others, especially during times when they feel like they have failed or when they believe others have failed them. Because receiving is difficult for them, true intimacy is a fleeting thing, so they often focus their relationship with God upon His acts, gifts, discipline, duty, and/or in hyper-religious activity. They may not even be able to sustain a healthy relationship with God at all. Their relationships with others, especially within their family, often depend upon the others' performance. Because they may fear their own weaknesses being exposed, they may feel threatened or withdraw if others get too close to their hidden core pain. They tend to find it very easy to see others' faults and justify keeping a reserved distance by the weaknesses they see in others. They may be very subtle in criticizing or devaluing others, either in their thought life or in conversation.

In part 2 we will look at the path to recovery.

---

PO Box 5
Conway, SC 29528, USA
(843) 365-8990
http://www.shilohplace.org
info@shilohplace.org