Coming Home: The Six-Month Mark

People in the Latter-day Saint Church often talk about the hardships of adjusting to life when one goes out on their two or one and a half year proselyting mission.  New rules, a new place, and sometimes even a new language provide new missionaries with never before experienced challenges.  

On top of that young missionaries are hundreds of miles away from their friends and family as they put on hold such important things as sports, hobbies, school or for some even a burgeoning career in order to serve the Lord.  I experienced some of these growing pains myself as a young missionary after having first arrived in Japan.  It was just as hard as it seemed but I eventually adjusted to mission life with the support and prayers of loved ones back home and the missionaries I served with.

Members in the church rarely talk about the journey of coming home however only occasionally alluding to socially awkward returned missionaries and jokingly guessing when a certain returned missionary will get married.  To be honest, I think returning to civilian life has been almost as hard as first landing in Japan.

What makes coming home from a mission so hard is the expectations that we place upon ourselves as returned missionaries.  I remember towards the end of the mission me trying to come to grips with what my life would be like after being released from my mission.  I reflected on the things I learned and all the skills I had fine-tuned as a missionary.  I imagined coming home as a more perfect version of my old self almost like a completely different person.  When I came back home though I found myself almost backsliding as I faced the same struggles I had two years previously.

For instance, because I had spent two years speaking to strangers and boldly inviting the Buddhist and Shinto Japanese to learn about Christ, I thought I would flawlessly be able to converse with the opposite gender.  I came back home to find that facing rejection in Japanese is a lot easier and that I still was very much like my timid pre-mission self when it came to approaching my female peers.  I thought I would study the scriptures every morning for an hour like on the mission but was disappointed to find that ten or fifteen minutes was the best I felt I could do as I struggled to balance the pressures of being a college student.

In missionary lingo, going home is referred to as ‘death’.  Once gone on that airplane, there is no turning back.  I’ll never again be a young missionary serving in Nagoya, Japan.  It is over.  Elder Hall in a sense is gone for good.  Death was sometimes looked as passing to a heaven-like existence.  With each passing day as a missionary, the more tired you’d become and the more resting and sleeping would sound like heaven.  When you had companion struggles, being on your own in death seemed ever more appealing.

When you die though you realize that the grass is greener on the other side.  As I sit studying in the library I yearn for the test free days of being a missionary.  When I ask myself why am I writing a five-page paper on Marx ideology I wish for the mornings when I would recite my missionary purpose of helping bring others to Christ and knowing my purpose in everything I did.  When coming home, you are brought down to Earth and to the life you will be living for the rest of your life. Growing up LDS, I always counted down until I’d be going on a mission and then as a missionary, my days were numbered until my two years would be over.  Now there is no clock.  I will be a returned missionary for the rest of my life.  No transfer will come to shake up my surroundings and give me a new start.

A couple of weeks ago, my roommate invited me to a Post-Mission Transition Workshop on campus and I decided to give it a shot.  There was a group of about twenty returned missionaries of both sexes which was small considering the thousands of returned missionaries that populate Brigham Young University's student body.  The meeting began with a prayer and then the instructor had us make a list of the things us returned missionaries have been struggling with since coming home.  Some of us had been home for two years and others for only two months but we all seemed to have similar issues.  How do I still live a meaningful life without a nametag?  How do I deal with the pressure of dating as all my friends continue getting married leaving me in the dust?  How do I make decisions like which major should I study that will forever affect my life?

Discussing our myriad of issues and giving our ways of coping and overcoming these issues was the first time since coming home from my mission I ever really considered that this wasn’t just something I was dealing with.  Having a tough time adjusting isn’t just a me problem, I think every returned missionary goes through a similar stage.  “It is hard,” the group leader told us, “It is hard.”  Just knowing I am not alone in struggling to apply the things I learned as a missionary in a foreign country to my everyday civilian life means everything.

There isn’t a fix-all solution.  Some may think that the next stage of marriage ends the struggles they may be facing now but didn’t I once think coming home would resolve all the trials I faced as a missionary?  This stage in life is just as important as the beginning of one’s mission.  I don’t think any faithful missionary would say that those two years were a waste or that sticking it out through those first few months wasn’t worth it.  With every hardship on a mission there was a miracle accompanying it just like how every steep mountain gives us a breathing taking view once we reach the summit.

That principle rings true as a returned missionary too.  Those miracles may not be a baptism or finding a new investigator five minutes before curfew but maybe acing a test you had been stressing about or realizing that something you did for someone made their day.  Just as God helps His missionaries find people to teach He also helps us returned missionaries find ourselves in this futile decade of decisions.  He has equipped us with the needed skills to succeed in life as a college student and later as a spouse, parent, and leader.  Many of those skills such as faith, hard work, and patience He taught us with firsthand experience on our missions.

Now is the time to “press forward with a steadfastness in Christ, having a perfect brightness of hope” (2 Nephi 31:20 Book of Mormon) to finish the spiritual progression many of us worked so hard for on our missions.  We are fulfilling different roles now than we did as missionaries but God only made our missions two years or a year and a half for a reason.

 

Perhaps the only thing harder than starting the mission was finishing it, realizing that this unique stage of development was coming to its close.  Despite all the hard trials we experienced on our missions, we grew attached to these moments as we saw in hindsight just what God wanted us to learn.  May we all create such treasured memories now as returned missionaries so that when the next stage comes we can look back on our current lives and reflect on all the things that God has taught us to prepare us for our ever-bright future.