This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

Editor's note • Robert Kirby is in Canada, eh. This is a reprint of an earlier column.

A couple of weeks ago, I listened to someone lament the fact that his son had left Mormonism to go be something else. I forget exactly what. Doesn't matter.

This person was devastated. He believed that his son had strayed from the straight and narrow and was now lost forever.

It was the Prodigal Son all over again, only without the happy ending.

By the way, this isn't just a Mormon thing. If you believe your faith is the right one, chances are pretty good that one or more of your kids will not see it that way.

Maybe it isn't just switching faiths. Maybe the treasure of your heart stopped going to church, period. Worse, maybe he or she became a Republican.

Whatever. The point is that it can be a painful experience when someone you love doesn't live his or her life according to your expectations. That's right. Let's not kid ourselves, OK? The pain we feel sometimes has more to do with a personal loss of control than any real notion that our loved one is lost forever.

Forever is God's business. Human beings have a hard enough time figuring out current events.

One of the great ironies of religion occurs when worry over the next life screws up this one.

Having been both a pained parent and a painful son, I have considerable experience with both sides of the Prodigal Son issue. I was better at the second one, but I did learn a thing or two about both. Let's assume that you and I are parents. Junior just told us that he spent his LDS mission fund on tattoos and piercings, and he moved in with his girlfriend.

Worse, he is going to the University of Utah.

We could have Junior killed. After all, wouldn't death be far kinder in the long run? It would certainly keep him from slouching further away.

This isn't as far-fetched as it sounds. Lots of frantic parents seem perfectly willing to destroy a relationship with a child over the issue of church affiliation.

How do we do this? Easy. We just let our disappointment speak louder than our love. We become the prod in prodigal. Pretty soon, Junior isn't running toward anything so much as he is running away from us.

But what do we really do? There has to be some way guaranteed to save Junior from a life of misery as a less-active Mormon.

Well, actually, no. This is his choice, not ours. Our job is to not make the situation worse. There are a number of things we can do to keep that from happening.

First, we have to shut up. Junior already knows how we feel. Twenty years of mandatory Sunday school attendance made that perfectly clear. So cool it with the lectures.

This includes any sniping. One of the first casualties of pain is subtlety. We must resist the urge to visit Junior and cleverly leave copies of "Ensign" lying around his apartment.

Second, we treat Junior's girlfriend kindly, even if she has a tattoo of a snake on her forehead. We don't improve our relationship with him by undermining theirs.

Next, we stay involved. Even if Junior's girlfriend turns out later to be a boy, we maintain contact in a positive way.

Remember all that boundless love and long-suffering stuff we wanted Junior to learn in Sunday school? It applies to us, too. Now is our chance to prove that we were paying attention.

Robert Kirby can be reached at rkirby@sltrib.com or facebook.com/stillnotpatbagley