I get this question from some parents: What should they do? They want steps, clarity, a plan. But this is not a formula kind of pain. It’s slower work — deeper and quieter. It’s the choice to remain in one’s child’s life even when it feels lopsidedly of service. It’s truth telling with a whisper not a shout. It’s praying even when prayer feels like the tiniest thing in your hands. It refuses to just be passive, without panicking either. It waits — but not one of the waiting in defeat. The kind that moves toward hope, not away from it. Because prodigals do come home.

And every once in a while I see an expression on a parent’s face that makes me pause. It usually happens after a sermon, or while we’re walking to the parking lot, or in the back of a quiet corner of the church where they think no one notices their eyes. It’s a cocktail of confusion, and sadness, and something that feels like fear. Parents of adult kids who have that look on their face I’ve seen people have in front of a grave.

Except that their children are still alive.

Still texting them.

Continuing to turn up at birthdays and holidays.

But something has changed.

These aren’t challenges of teenagers slamming doors and pushing curfews. They are sons and daughters in their 20s, 30s, 40s — educated, employed and articulate — but ever more distant from the people who raised them to believe. Parents sit at a kitchen table across from their adult child and think: I don’t know who this person is anymore.

And it hurts.

Somehow, the worldview that had created their home — the gospel that felt like a shared plotline of their relationship — had fallen out from under them. It didn’t happen overnight. It never does. It’s generally slow, quiet, almost polite. A soft pulling away. A conversation that concludes not as it once did. A tone you can’t quite place. A comment that makes you wonder: Wait … where did that come from?

And then one day you’re looking at this kid you raised, and he just seems like a complete stranger who shares your blood but not much else.

Perhaps that’s why it is on my mind now.

The holidays really exacerbate things that we are able to overlook in June. You sit in a crowded living room, surrounded by people you love, and somehow the gap between your own child and you is starker. You listen to their voice, but the convictions contained within it seem to belong to some distant land. Conversations tiptoe around landmines. You want to say something. You’re terrified to say something. You attempt to focus on the impending cool air, but a knot is lodged in the middle of your chest.

The holidays don’t make the wound.

They only make it so you can’t hide.

When I wrote Letters to Parents of Prodigals, I had not written from theory. I wrote from somewhere that had already been battered. I wrote because I knew what it was like to rehash conversations at two in the morning.

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