When he was a young boy, Michael Landon Jr. spent a lot of time hanging out with his famous father on the set of Little House on the Prairie.

They're some of the happiest memories of his life, and Little House is, to this day, the younger Landon's favorite work from his dad's family-friendly repertoire of long-running TV shows—which also included stints as Little Joe on Bonanza and as the angel Jonathan Smith on Highway to Heaven.

As far as Landon is concerned, Little House was as good as it gets, and his dad was the epitome of Pa Ingalls. Young Michael saw his father the way the rest of the world did—as warm, loving, and a consummate family man who could do no wrong.

"He was my everything as I was growing up," says Michael. "I had a certain vision of my father, a vision I think was perpetuated by the role he was playing at the time and by the way the public perceived him. He was the perfect dad."

But that perfect image was shattered one afternoon when Michael came home from high school. He was met at the door by an uncle, who had clearly been crying. The uncle sat Michael and his sister Leslie down on the couch and broke the news.

"Your dad has left," he said. "Your mother is upstairs. She's a wreck, and she needs you to comfort her."

Today, Landon says he was blindsided by the news. He later learned that his father had been having an affair with someone who worked behind the scenes of Little House, and that unfaithfulness led to his parents' divorce.

The unimaginable had happened: Pa Ingalls, a promise keeper long before Promise Keepers was cool, had had a tryst and split from his wife. A Hollywood scandal indeed.

"My world was completely shattered," says Landon, who was 15 at the time.

That shattered world would soon spin out of control.

"After my father left," says Landon, "I went through a few really tough years. I went from being an honor roll student to just barely getting by. I started experimenting with pot and alcohol. All these things came into my life and started to destroy it."

His self-destructive behavior continued through high school and on into his freshman year at the University of Southern California.

Meanwhile, his mother, who had also been shattered by the divorce, had found a sensitive listener in her manicurist, a Christian woman named Louise. As she shared her painful story with Louise, Louise in turn shared her faith.

"And then," Landon says, "she took my mother to church. And then my mother got saved."

Landon, then 18, was still playing the role of party animal, "absolutely raising hell," as he puts it. "My mom started asking me if I wanted to go to church with her. I didn't want to have anything to do with it."

But his mom persisted, and Michael finally relented, "just to get her off my back."

And then God got on his back—in the persistent, persuasive way that only God can do.

"I couldn't tell you what the pastor was talking about that day," Landon says. "But it impacted me."

Still, Landon returned to Southern Cal and his partying ways, despite the nagging sense that God was trying to break through.

"I fought it," says Landon, now 41. "I got kicked out of USC, because of my academics. I didn't bother to go to class. It was that bad.

"I finally went back to church again, resisted some more, went back again, resisted again. And then finally I stopped fighting and gave my life to Christ, just before I turned 19."

His life finally on track, Landon decided to follow in his father's footsteps—sort of. He never wanted to be the star in front of the camera but the man behind it, so he went into directing. He wanted to make the same kind of family-friendly fare by which people knew his father, who died of pancreatic cancer in 1991.

Lately, that has included directing TV movies based on the first four books in Janette Oke's popular Love Comes Softly series. The first film, 2003's Love Comes Softly, was a smash hit on the Hallmark Channel, which quickly signed up Landon for the sequel, 2004's Love's Enduring Promise. Both are now available on DVD.

Hallmark plans to do the next film in the Love Comes Softly series, but filming has not yet begun. Landon says it's possible that all eight books will be turned into films, but it depends on how each of the movies does in ratings and in sales.

The stories are about faith and family and life—not unlike Little House, which is exactly what attracted Landon to the series in the first place.

"I had a passion for the genre—that 1850s pioneer era—through my father. Little House was by far my favorite of my father's work," he says. "The other part of my attraction was Janette's ease of naturally intertwining faith elements into the stories, and another thing that really drew me was the Clark Davis character in the books. He embodied everything I would like to be as a father and husband. It's rare in the movies these days to find a male role model who actually prays to God and lives out his faith."

Landon also likes the fact that faith comes softly in the stories; they're not preachy.

"In Christian filmmaking," he says, "sometimes I feel like there's too much manipulation in trying to get the faith element across; sometimes it's a little too heavy-handed. I think if you allow your characters to live out their faith in their lives, that speaks for itself."

Letting faith speak for itself is what Landon tries to do—not just in his filmmaking, but personally as well. And while he wants to create the same type of entertainment his dad did, he also wants to avoid repeating his father's sins—for the sake of his wife, Sharee, and for their three children, Ashley (13), Brittany (10) and Austin (6).

Maybe that's why his 18-year marriage is going so strong.

"The main thing," he says, "is remembering the pain I went through. Otherwise, I think people would be divorcing left and right. I am extremely protective of my marriage, and I create boundaries for myself.

"I see my three children and know that the last thing I'd ever want to do to them is be unfaithful to my wife, not only for her sake, but for their sake, and for my sake. I refuse to ruin my testimony. So it's a combination of all those things—honoring God and running the rest of this race as best I can."