Can a Fear Be Inherited?

When I was in sixth grade, as part of doing a research paper, I needed to call New Tribes Mission in order to get an address for a missionary in Papua New Guinea.

This was the most traumatic experience of my childhood, and I don’t remember placing another call to an organization until I was in my early 30s. (It is possible that I also didn’t make any of my sons do any research papers, which perhaps will not serve them well in life, but at least I didn’t spread the trauma further.)

Recently I was asked the Lord about this unusual response, because as an adult I recognize that this really should not have been traumatic. All the people I’ve talked to at various missions organizations have been kind and helpful.

Lord, what is going on?

Usually when there’s something unexplained, there is a generational root.

Three of my grandparents emigrated after World War II. One was a German Jew who fled Nazi Germany just before Hitler closed the borders. The other two were from the Netherlands, and some of their family members were part of the Dutch underground. For their fiftieth anniversary, they took us to see their childhood homes, and we saw the ditch where Grandma’s brothers hid when the Nazis came looking for them.

The internet tells me that telephones weren’t in widespread use in Germany or the Netherlands until some years after the war, but perhaps a sense of foreboding passed down with telegraph messages.

Or maybe the challenges of trying to be heard … I don’t know.

In any case, this is the prayer that I prayed in order to break free.

Lord, I don’t know the family history well enough, but the scenarios I just suggested seem certainly resonant. I’m actually going to pray this on behalf of my mother and my father and my siblings as well, and for any of our third generation offspring.

Lord, I ask that you would interpose the cross of Christ at the point of our conceptions, and that as there is a polluted stream coming down to us that affects us in different ways, I pray that any of those pollutions would fall to the ground, rendered null and void, that we would receive the gifts of our inheritance and not the curses.

Lord, I pray that as we have lived for a certain number of years under the taint of those fears, those traumas, Holy Spirit, I pray that you would come with your beautiful water of cleansing and wash us clean, that we would be able to live from now on from a place of newness of life and eager expectation, that the phone itself would not hold terrifying memories or any residual trauma.

Lord, in my adult life I’ve been pleased to find that the people that I call and talk to actually want to help me. Lord, I pray that you would bless us with the ability to recognize that the people that we’re connecting with are human beings made in your image, and that any trauma or terror that might linger from the past would be broken in the name of Jesus.

And Lord, even as I was praying this, I got a little bit of a headache, which to me usually indicates witchcraft, manipulation, and control. Very unusual in this prayer. Lord, I would assume that any of those scenarios would have some element of manipulation and control related to them.

Lord, thank you that you are the God of freedom. To anything that’s residual and nasty, I say: the Lord rebuke you, the Lord rebuke you, the Lord rebuke you. Amen.

Thank God who gives us the victory, through our Lord Jesus the Messiah,

Amy Joy

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