Feature

In a marriage, two people with different backgrounds and often different values come together and work to merge their two worlds into some kind of unity. When they divorce, however, the job of making sense of their two worlds and the conflicts that arise between them gets handed from the adults to the child. Now the child is on his own to negotiate the different beliefs and values and ways of living that he finds in each parent's world.

When I asked my friend about his work as an associate pastor, he ripped into his senior minister: “He won’t communicate! He doesn’t even seem interested in what I do at his church!” When I spoke with a senior pastor, he sighed. “Sometimes with my staff I feel like my dad did during a long car trip. When we kids would get rambunctious, he’d take just so much before turning around to give us a good whack.”