“My child is angry, can you help me?! That was my first request to counsel a school age child. It was apparent that our usual interview techniques and approaches to healing prayer would be ineffective. Children have such short attention spans, and they have their own agendas. Counseling adults is complicated enough, how would I ever reach into a child’s heart and mind and find the issues that are truly holding them captive?
I was stimulated by the wonderful
book, Dibs. I was inspired to believe that if through the
medium of play a child’s spirit could be called to life without prayer, then I
had life transforming tools at my fingertips.
As I prayed, read, and consulted with a kindergarten teacher, the Lord
led me to set up a play area in one corner of my office utilizing garage sales
and thrift stores!
Through the use of hoola hoop,
they learned that we have a right to set boundaries and how to politely share
those boundaries with others. Using the
Feelings Puzzle (red blocks represent angry feelings, yellow is afraid, blue is
sad, and green is happy), the children could tell me how they were feeling as soon
as they entered the room. Sometimes,
their happy (green) feelings were encased in the angry red blocks and that was
the only way they could share that things had been tough that week. The similarly colored play dough allowed them
to work out those feelings with their hands, and at times they participated
incredibly with the Holy Spirit as they played with that colored clay.
In the sand box (a 2 x 3 foot
Rubbermaid tub), they dramatized their fears, offences and pain using plastic
characters, animals and objects. Without
any direction, they talked to me with dramatic action. When the child figure is surrounded by wild
animals, we could pray and ask God what the child needed for safety. Jesus would enter the sandbox and shine His
light into the dark places. At times,
the children would deeply bury the figure representing the person who hurt
them.
Using animal puppets and creating
their own script, they gave me repeated messages of rejection, abandonment,
abuse and other wounds. It amazed me how
quickly the children disclosed their issue with the sandbox, puppets and
drawing pads.
A little girl watched her daddy
divorce and remarry. A doll house became
the vehicle where she expressed her desire to have daddy come back and live
with them again. Week after week, she
put daddy back in the house in her mother’s bed. We prayed for her healing until one day she
created a happy house that contained herself and her mother and Jesus.
I was absolutely convinced of the
anointing on Play and Pray Therapy when a six-year-old girl made a green (happy)
baby out of play dough and wrapped the baby in a blue (sad) womb. Then she put a speck of yellow into it
too. “Sad is in my family more than
mad,” she said. Together we talked to
Jesus and she boldly asked Him to heal the little baby and make her happy
again. We asked Him to absorb the fear
and sadness. As we prayed, she
transformed the play dough around the happy baby. The mother later confirmed that she had been
depressed and afraid during the pregnancy.
The child was not finished until she had taken the unlabeled purple play
dough and covered the womb and the baby in the purple, calling it
forgiveness. Jesus had led her by the
hand and walked her through prenatal healing!
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