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The ringing phone woke us out of a deep sleep. I scrabbled for the receiver. "Hello?" I mumbled.

"Reverend Payton? It's Tiffany. I'm sorry to call so late." The young woman sounded weepy.

"That's all right. What's wrong?"

"Justin's left me. He just walked out."

"I'm sorry to hear that." I was becoming fully awake.

"I don't know what to do."

Realizing this wasn't going to be a quick call, I told Tiffany I needed to switch phones. Susie was eight months pregnant with our second child, and I didn't want to keep her awake unnecessarily. Tommy was almost 7, and we'd begun to think Susie would not conceive again. Then she discovered herself with child, and we both rejoiced. I handed her the receiver and asked her to hang it up once I'd picked up downstairs.

Pulling on my bathrobe, I staggered down the stairs, thinking about the couple. Justin and Tiffany, both in their late twenties, were members of my church, as were Tiffany's parents and grandparents. Justin hadn't grown up in the church, but had joined shortly after he and Tiffany married. And he'd become a hard-working member, eventually serving on the Board of Trustees and performing usher duties during Sunday services.

But for reasons that I could never figure out, Tiffany's mother, Margaret, didn't like the young man. She'd been against the marriage from the start, although once Tiffany made it clear she was going through with it, her mother threw herself into the wedding preparations.

Nonetheless, Margaret continued to find fault with Justin, and Tiffany, who was close to her mother, often felt caught in the middle.

Once on the other line, I asked Tiffany what had happened.

"Another fight," she said, her voice breaking. "But a really big one this time. Mom got Grandpa to offer Justin a job. It would have been a better salary, but Justin didn't want it. I guess I kind of pressured him to take it. But he wouldn't. He got really mad at me."

From past experience with the couple, I could envision what Tiffany meant by "pressured." She wasn't a nagger, but if the argument followed a course similar to previous ones I'd helped them untangle, she had tried to "reason" with Justin, doggedly laying down statement after statement about why Justin should accept the offer. And at least some of those statements would have started with, "Mom thinks ..." And they'd have rolled roughshod over Justin's protestations that he already had a job, one in the career path he wanted to pursue.

Like many young couples, Justin and Tiffany had financial problems. A better salary would have been welcome, but I knew money wasn't really the primary cause of the current disagreement. It wasn't even Margaret's interference, but Tiffany's unwillingness to establish enough independence from her.

I could also guess that Tiffany's marshaled arguments included the statement that her grandfather had been generous in proffering the job, and that she didn't want to offend him by Justin's refusal of the offer. I'd refereed disputes between the couple involving similar scenarios before and had helped them look at the roots of their problems. But of course, looking at them and modifying deeply ingrained behavior were two different things.

Justin, despite his basic decency, wasn't the sort to ease tension. Quick to anger and sharply critical of his wife, he'd have quickly flamed up as Tiffany battered him with reason after reason why he should acquiesce. He'd stormed out of the house before, but Tiffany's statement this time that "Justin's left me," was a first, and suggested that matters had reached a new low.

Listening to Tiffany now on the phone, I heard a child's cry in the background. "Are the boys up?" I asked.

"Yes, the argument woke up Kyle, and he woke up Jess."

"Well, you need to get them settled again. There's not much we can do tonight. Why don't you come in to the church tomorrow, and we can talk further then? I could see you around 10:00. Will that work?"

Tiffany said it would, but launched into a retelling of the argument. I let her go for a couple of minutes, but eventually insisted she get her boys back to sleep. That seemed to finally get through to her.

Once back in bed, my mind wouldn't shut off. "Grandpa" was Margaret's father, Owen. He owned a successful lumber business and, along with his wife, Maribeth, had been "pillar" members of the congregation for years. The whole family was highly respected in the community and the church.

It was not a misplaced respect either, for they were good people, but through my involvement with Justin and Tiffany, I had a view of a family dynamic most outsiders didn't see.

Initially, when Tiffany and Justin had first come to me to help them through a marital rough spot, I'd tried to help them examine how they communicated, both verbally and in the more subtle ways warring couples jab each other. I thought they'd made some progress. But when their relationship hit more trouble, the understanding they'd gained didn't seem to serve them very well.

As Margaret's complicity in their problems became clear, I began to think of their difficulties as involving two generations. I'd talked at length with both Tiffany and Justin about what they needed to do to maintain a healthy separation between Margaret's expectations and their own goals. But while Tiffany supposedly understood and agreed, she was unable to put her understanding into action for very long. When Margaret spoke up, Tiffany, even while arguing with her mother, was also getting "hooked" again by the power of Margaret's personality.

The longer I worked with the couple, the more I understood that their problems played out on a larger arena, involving not two but three generations. From everything I knew, neither Owen nor Maribeth was ever directly involved in any of Justin and Tiffany's spats. If anything, they steered clear of the conflict and tried to maintain a friendly relationship with both their granddaughter and her husband. Their complicity -- especially Owen's -- in the couple's deepening woes was behind the scenes. Owen, who apparently liked Justin, still thought him not motivated enough to seize opportunity and shared his opinion with Margaret. Owen himself, when Justin's age, had arrived in the community nearly penniless, and within a few short years had founded his business and built it to financial success.

As near as I could tell, Margaret's relationship with her father was based on genuine admiration for him. Clearly, he had been actively involved in his daughter's life while she was growing up, and, based on how often Margaret quoted Owen's self-confident advice, she still considered him a strong figure in her life. Too strong perhaps. Whenever I'd heard Margaret refer to her dad, her tone became almost submissive -- very different from the forceful manner she adopted with Tiffany.

Margaret's relationship with her husband, Ted, revealed yet another view of her personality. It was obvious to me that while Owen and Ted respected each other, Ted had early on established boundaries around his own household, which Owen accepted. Ted and Margaret's relationship, it seemed to me, was that of equals.

In Owen's view, Margaret had married well, and if Ted was an independent thinker who insisted Owen stay out of his marriage, that was fine. Ted, so I'd heard Owen say, had life "well in hand."

Ted viewed Tiffany's and Justin's problems as "just between them," and though he knew of his wife's involvement in their arguments, he saw his role as one of peacemaker, trying to smooth things over between his wife and daughter. Unfortunately, his efforts were like trying to stop a hemorrhage with a Band-Aid.

When Tiffany arrived at the church in the morning, she told me she had called Justin's workplace and found him there. He'd reported for work as usual. On the phone, she asked him to come home after work, but Justin said he didn't think he would. "We have no future," he'd said plainly.

Tiffany had left the boys with her mother so she could come to talk with me, and while dropping them off, she had filled her mother in on the battle the night before. Tiffany told me that Margaret's response had been, "If Justin doesn't come back, it might be for the best."

We talked for a while. Tiffany started describing the argument in detail. When I pushed her to look beyond the "he-said-I-said" account at the larger issues, she tried, but I could sense a weariness in her that seemed to block comprehension.

And then we were interrupted by my secretary knocking on the door, an unusual occurrence during counseling. "I'm sorry to cut in," she said, "but Susie called. She's in labor and says you should come home right away."

I told Tiffany we'd have to continue our discussion later, and she agreed I should hurry home.

Our daughter Jenny was born nine hours later, a little premature, but with other problems as well. She was a beautiful girl, but we never got to bring her home from the hospital. Susie and I spent days and days with her there, but after eight weeks little Jenny died.

We were heartbroken, and though I tried to be strong for Susie, I hurt deeply. The congregation was supportive, helping out with Tommy, sending in meals, praying for us, and insisting that I take some time off from parish duties. Owen stopped by to offer his condolences and told me of a child he and Maribeth had lost in the early years of their marriage. "I thought for a while I wouldn't get through it," he said, "but I had to. Maribeth needed me and so did Margaret." Somehow I found the old man's visit especially comforting.

During that time, Justin sued for divorce, which Tiffany did not contest. They shared custody of their boys, but Kyle and Jess spent most of their time with Tiffany, and thus with Margaret and Ted, and with Owen and Maribeth. When the boys were teens, they both worked after school in Owen's lumberyard. Kyle loved it, and Owen, who was already in his seventies, began grooming Kyle to take over the business. Jess, however, had a different temperament, and pursued other interests. His inattentiveness at the yard made him the object of Owen's disapproval time and again, and during one scolding, Owen said, "You're just like your father. It's too bad." Or at least that's what Jess heard.

Who can say if Owen's attitude toward those who didn't match his idea of hard work had anything to do with trouble Jess got into later? After a spree involving drugs and car theft, Jess spent six months in county jail. Jess never blamed anyone but himself, but he once told me, "I could never please my great-grandfather."

In more than one place in the Old Testament, there is a reference to God "visiting" the sin of parents upon their children and their children's children, even as far as the fourth generation. I had always found them difficult words to understand, but gradually, as I worked with multigenerational families, I began to get a glimmer of what that meant. In the Old Testament era, families lived together in clans, with the eldest male in absolute charge. Given normal lifespans, four generations is about all that would be alive and dwelling together at any one time, and thus all that would be affected by actions, be they good or bad, of the patriarch. But such was the power of the male elder that his decisions sat heavily on all four generations in his camp.

But who can trace with absolute certainty cause and effect through a chain of human relationships? All I know is that when people ask me to counsel them, I am never sure how many generations enter my study when the counselee walks in.