Some family patterns repeat across generations without anyone ever naming them out loud — limitless sacrifice, silence in the face of pain, love that gets confused with total self-abandonment. Few voices in the Spanish-speaking world have spent as much time naming these patterns, and showing how to break them, as Pastor Sixto Porras.
Porras is Vice President of Hispanic Ministry Development at Focus on the Family and has led its Spanish-language ministry, Enfoque a la Familia, since 1998. His radio and television programs reach 38 countries, and he has written eight books and co-written two more. Focus on the Family is recognized by the United Nations Economic and Social Council as a special adviser; Porras himself has been invited by Latin American governments to speak on family issues and honored by the Congress of Peru and the Puerto Rican Senate. Alongside his wife Helen, he has raised two sons on the same message he preaches: that family holds together through conscious decisions, not inertia.
His most recent work, an updated edition of his bestseller El Lenguaje del Perdón (The Language of Forgiveness), includes a chapter devoted entirely to this theme: "The Forgiveness That Heals Generations," on how the decision to forgive transforms the emotional destiny of children, grandchildren, and generations still to come. As he writes, forgiveness "isn't just something that happens; it's something you decide."
That's exactly the central idea of the first article in this series: that an inherited pattern — like putting yourself last without realizing it — doesn't break by accident. It breaks through a conscious decision that almost always starts with forgiveness.
Forgiveness “isn't just something that happens; it's something you decide.”
