Pause, take a moment to take an overview of your family. Your children, siblings, parents. Now pause again and take a look at your uncles, aunts, and your grandparents. Now move on up to your great and great-great uncles, aunts and their parents. What do you notice? What thing seems to be consistent in each of these generations? There has to be something even just one thing that is persistent throughout whether good or bad. Is it family unity, charity, wealth, education, peace? Is it family division, unforgiveness, poverty, school drop outs, strife, alcoholism, sexual immorality, diseases, witch craft? Whatever you have identified is a pattern. Patterns go on from one generation to the other. Let’s call them cycles.

I believe every family has an existing cycle. Certain cycles are easily noticeable while others seem to be subtle, requiring Sherlock Holmes skills to pick up. When you listen around in your community, you will notice that families are identified by their patterns. For instance, one would say family A is full of educated people, Family B is full of drunkards, Family C is full of witches. It is by some of these patterns that people base decisions such as who to marry.

The good cycles should by all means continue and be made even better from one generation to the next. The bad ones should be ruthlessly abolished. But how? How does one break a chain of ancestral heritage that has existed for decades and has had a comfortable seat in the family to the point where it is an invited guest to every new generation? The short answer is: it’s not easy. You need to wage a war on whatever that thing is and you need to choose the right weapons. Some cycles will require physical weapons to break, some habitual while others may require the unpopular spiritual weapons.

I do not know what cycles you need to break but I know that if you decide to do it, you need to be prepared to face resistance. It may also surprise you that to break most of the cycles you may need to start with yourself before you go on the mission impossible of changing others. Identify those things in you that are contributing to the continuation of the cycle and deal with them. It’s a painful process but doable. You may not fully succeed but once you start and decide to pass that baton to the generation after yourself, elimination and total extinction of that cycle is possible. It took generations for it to form and mature to the level where it is and it may take even more generations to wipe it out. So, why don’t YOU start? Be the game changer and decide that enough is enough. Refuse to accept the notion of “It just runs in our family”. Once you are done, pass on the baton to the next generation.