3 generations, one choice: Breaking a cycle of fear and addiction

By Caitlin Hawk, Op-ed contributor Sunday, August 16, 2026

What legacy are you leaving for the people who come after you?

Most of us never ask this question until it's too late to answer. Every one of us is going to leave something behind for the people in our lives, and it can either be something good or something destructive.

We live in a culture that puts self before almost everything else. But legacy asks something different of us. It requires us to build something beyond ourselves, something we may never live to see the fruit of.

I know this firsthand, because my own life was headed straight toward a legacy of destruction.

From a young age, I was caught in a cycle of drugs, alcohol and toxic relationships, unwilling to change my ways. My decisions were driven by lust, not love, and the trajectory I was on was pointed toward sin and brokenness. I was adopted as a child by Christian parents, and even though I grew up loved, I still carried an unspoken fear that I would end up repeating the same story as my birth mother.

My birth mother was 19 and unwed when she found out she was pregnant with me, and my birth father tried to convince her to have an abortion. Praise God that she went through with the pregnancy and placed me up for adoption, despite outside influencers telling her otherwise. I've always seen that as a kind of inheritance in itself, with her choosing life for me when she didn't have to.

While I don't know every detail of my birth mother's journey, I know that her life was marked by much pain and uncertainty, especially during the months she carried me. Knowing this gives me a deeper respect for the courage it took for her to choose life, even amid her own personal struggles.

I found myself in a nearly identical situation as my birth mother, pregnant with twins at 19 and unmarried. The twins' father wasn't able to show up for me the way I needed, and he ultimately walked away from our relationship. While I won't pretend that didn't hurt, I've also come to see that he was carrying his own brokenness, just as I was carrying mine. Further, more than one person in my life at the time suggested abortion would be the easiest way out.

But everything changed when I chose life and had my twins, placing them up for adoption with a loving, God-fearing family. It was then that I sensed the Lord warning me that if I kept choosing the same kind of men my own birth mother had chosen and the same unhealthy habits, my daughters would inherit that same pattern.

That moment became the beginning of everything I now know about legacy.

How renewing my mind changed my path

To change my ways, I couldn't simply will myself into different choices. I had to understand what biblical love truly is because my definition of it had been shaped by years of chasing highs instead of health. So, I made it a priority to sit in Scripture daily and let my mind be renewed. It wasn't a quick fix, though. It was a long, sometimes messy process of tearing down beliefs that had become normal for me for far too long.

In this season, while learning what a healthy love could actually look like, I met my husband, Brandon. He was stable, hardworking and humble. He was everything I should have wanted. Yet his steadiness scared me at first. I was so used to emotional highs and lows that his sense of normalcy felt foreign to me. It took intentionality and real inner work to recognize that the peace I felt with him wasn't boring. It was wisdom.

A new bloodline in Christ

Through this experience, I learned an important truth: You are never bound to your family's previous choices once you have become a new creation in Christ. You can carve a new path. You're able to not just break habits, but patterns that run deep through generations. It's hard work, but it's also one of the most rewarding things a person can ever do.

That is the real weight behind being called a new creation in 2 Corinthians 5:17. The addiction. The shame. The fear of abandonment. The habit of choosing people who are bad for you. None of it has to be fate simply because it is familiar. You can replace it all with a legacy that outlives you.

Every seed has a harvest

I won't get to see the entire harvest my choices today will produce. But that's how seeds work. Each one carries a long-term result, regardless of whether we plant it in faith or in fear. The only real choice we get is what we plant while everyone else waits for fall.

So, I chose to stop repeating my birth mother's story of instability and fear of trust. I chose a new bloodline in Christ instead — one my children can now build on.

God works the same way. He doesn't build all at once, but slowly, over time and in seed form, so that character has time to take root before anything else is built on top of it. In a culture obsessed with instant results, that's a hard concept to accept. But it's the only kind of legacy that actually lasts.

It takes showing up

Change doesn't happen by accident. It certainly doesn't happen simply by hoping things will improve on their own. A legacy can't survive on hope alone. At some point, hope has to be matched with intention and the willingness to fight against the patterns that we've let run unchecked for generations.

True life transformation does not come from waiting around for motivation to show up. It comes from making a choice over and over again to keep moving forward, even when everything in you wants to quit.

Some days, that looks like getting knocked flat and choosing to stand back up anyway. Paul talks about this same kind of resolve in 1 Corinthians 9, describing his own faith like training for a race, putting real effort behind it instead of just going through the motions.

That is the picture I keep in my mind on the days I feel like giving up. The effort matters even when nobody is watching. Even a small, quiet decision that no one else will ever notice still counts toward who you are becoming.

What kind of legacy are you leaving?

The real question was never whether you will leave a legacy.

You already are, right now, in the decisions you make when you think no one is watching. The quiet moment of choosing Scripture over an old habit. The pattern you finally decided to break instead of passing down. The discipline nobody sees but that alters the trajectory of your life.

Get clear on the vision God has given you, make a plan and run with it. The generations to come are at stake, and every seed we plant today is one someone else will eventually eat the fruit of. The only question worth asking is what kind of legacy you are building for the ones who come after you.