Not long after, God led me to a journal that my great-aunt had written to memorialize the life of her sister — my grandmother — who died at the age of 26.

My mother told me that her death followed a surgery meant to fix damage caused by multiple abortions. As I read this journal — one I had found years ago and stuck in a box unread — I discovered that my grandmother underwent surgery “to correct the bladder problem that had bothered her since childbirth.” Days later, an embolism went to her heart and killed her.

The words “bladder problem that had bothered her since childbirth” jumped off the page in neon. My first physical symptoms of sickness started in the hospital shortly after the birth of my first child. In fact, I found out many years later that the trauma of childbirth flipped a genetic switch in my body that caused a host of autoimmune disorders, starting with a tormenting and painful bladder condition called interstitial cystitis.

As I read that journal, God clearly said to my heart, “Satan has been attacking life in your family for generations. What he used to destroy your grandmother, I am using to draw you to Me and heal you. You know the real Me now. You pray in the power of the real God to break this generational bondage.”

I prayed out loud right then and there that God would break the bondage that had held my family hostage for so long. He opened my eyes to the long history of Satan’s attack on life in the women in my family — infertility, abortions, endometriosis, near miscarriages, ovarian cancer, early hysterectomies. God was breaking it! I woke up the next morning and the first thing in my head, before I was fully awake, was the thought, You are a new creation.