“The bare statistics of my ancestry I had always known, together with the fact that my first American forbear had come to the colonies under a strange cloud. Of details, however, I had been kept wholly ignorant through the policy of reticence always maintained by the Delapores. Unlike our planter neighbours, we seldom boasted of crusading ancestors or other mediaeval and Renaissance heroes; nor was any kind of tradition handed down except what may have been recorded in the sealed envelope left before the Civil War by every squire to his eldest son for posthumous opening. The glories we cherished were those achieved since the migration; the glories of a proud and honourable, if somewhat reserved and unsocial Virginia line.”
So begins one of my favorite short stories, “The Rats in the Walls”. It is a horror story, and an extremely frightening one at that. A synopsis would look like this: a wealthy American is led by fate to his ancestral family estate in England where the secret demonic truth of his family line draws him inextricably toward becoming a monster.
By the end, the main character is a murderer and a fiend in spite of all his desires not to be. The pull of his family’s terrible history proved an unstoppable curse that breaks him spirit, mind, and body:
“When I speak of poor Norrys they accuse me of a hideous thing, but they must know that I did not do it. They must know it was the rats; the slithering, scurrying rats whose scampering will never let me sleep; the daemon rats that race behind the padding in this room and beckon me down to greater horrors than I have ever known; the rats they can never hear; the rats, the rats in the walls.”
Now, why in the world am I bringing this up? Because this is exactly NOT THE CASE with anyone who is in Christ. Indeed, your family history can furnish you with iffy genetics, trauma, abuse, weird customs, strange habits, and a variety of “normal” behaviors that only seem normal to you, but there is no outside spiritual force pulling poor doomed Christians toward an unavoidable fate that has somehow been predetermined by their family.
Some of us really need to hear this. Some of us have pretty disturbing and even evil things in our family’s past. Before you look back at it, remember that Jesus Christ, the Curse-taker and chain-breaker, bled and died to rip you away from the domain of darkness and plant you firmly in the Kingdom of Light. The Devil and his demons can exert no authority over you: Jesus has conquered them. Your family line no longer passes on its spiritual gunk: Jesus has given you a new spiritual lineage. Genetics, habits, trauma, and customs may remain to be dealt with, but any spiritual terror is beaten and gone.
Whenever you look back, stand here.