I’ll admit right off that this is a difficult post for me to write. I’m having to dig up some deep emotions

that took root in my heart when I was just a little girl.

What brought this to the forefront is a live streaming webcast of a Colorado Pastor’s sermon I listened to this past Sunday. The crux of his message was answering the question, “Why do people feel like they don’t belong?” This sermon could have went any number of ways and most of us would relate in some fashion or another. His first answer to that question hit me like a ton of bricks. The Orphan Spirit.

The Orphan Spirit is one of the leading reasons people feel like they don’t belong or  ’fit’. I don’t believe it’s literally a ‘spirit’, but a type of individual who struggles as if they were orphaned. There are kids that grew up literally without parents, and are the definition of orphan. Of course, we readily see why an orphan would feel haunted with the thought that they don’t belong or aren’t wanted, after facing the ultimate rejection by the very people who birthed them.

But there’s another kind of orphan, those with the Orphan Spirit. These kids may have had parents physically present at one point, but absent emotionally, never really connecting with their kids. I think it would shock us all if we knew how many kids’ parents never said “I love you”.

I can imagine both sides of this Orphan Spirit. One I don’t have to imagine.

You see, when I was 5 or 6 (details aren’t clear), my birth father (whom I’ll refer to as Steele) & mother divorced because of their volatile and violent relationship. My mother did her best to take care of me and my older brother, while trying to keep food on the table, after Steele left. He left her and us with nothing. He took everything, including the heart of his little girl who could not figure out why on earth Daddy would forget all about her. He never called. He never contacted me. All the birthdays & holidays came & went without anything. Honestly, as far as I knew, he could be dead. And to help myself cope with it, I often pretended he was dead.

Most of what I knew of him could be found on my birth certificate.

Today, as I’m writing this, is Steele’s birthday. It brought up some emotions in me that I thought I’d dealt with. The truth is at my core I’ve always had a fear that everyone else in my life that said they cared would eventually leave too – my mom, my husband, my friends. This has been the deep struggle of my life – that I’m not worth anyone’s time.

I know what it’s like to be rejected by a person that helped give you life. There are many children, like me, who’ve had one or more parents walk away and never look back. We spend our lives overcoming that “Orphan Spirit” of fear & abandonment. Moms ~ maybe you know exactly what I’m talking about. This could be your story. You now are a parent who feels so much love for your child you could never imagine doing to them what was done to you.

Yeah, I know that as a kid I couldn’t have seen all that was going on in my parent’s marriage or the real reason Steele left. But that’s just it, kids don’t know. So what do they do? They think it’s because they did something wrong. They weren’t good enough. They didn’t love Daddy/Mommy enough. They were in the way. They spend their life trying to measure up.

I like to end my posts on a positive note… and I will. This is Part One of the post. In Part Two I share the redemptive side of the story. No, Steele never came back to make our family complete. This redemption story is so much bigger than that…

An Orphan Spirit, Part Two

Keep lovin’ Moms!