Hitting the ground running upon returning from a full-time mission can both be energizing and challenging, said teachers and students. Through struggles and opportunities, returned missionaries forge their future.
“I have always thought,” said Randal Allred, professor of English and former YSA bishop, “that the problem of adjusting to life after mission isn’t to keep yourself busy. On your mission, your life is very simple. There is one thing and you focus all of your energy on it. And when you get home suddenly it gets complicated. Your life has been on hold and it gets back to you.”
He continued, “Even though you work hard on your mission, it is refreshing and invigorating to not have to worry about the other stuff. You have special protection you don’t have when you are not a missionary anymore. You don’t realize it until after.”
Jacob McGee, a sophomore majoring in biochemistry from California, has confidence for the future. “When you served your mission well,” said McGee, “you are blessed with the confirmation of peace and assurance for the future.”
Although it was a tough transition for him, McGee said he knew he worked really hard on his mission. “I gave away my last two Book of Mormons on the plane ride home. When I first got back home, the hardest thing was knowing I would never be in that setting again, helping and inviting other people to repent and training missionaries. I needed to accept that I can’t devote all the time I have to the gospel.“
After preaching the gospel every day for two years, Allred said upon coming home, many young people feel too much time a day is taken up with things that don’t really matter.
Besides getting used to being alone, it was a rather easy transition for Hàlston Wood, a freshman majoring in biochemistry from Idaho. He served his mission in Washington DC. “You meet people from all over the world out there. It was the perfect place for me to be. I didn’t feel I totally struggled. I never saw myself in an awkward position,” said Wood.
Standing in holy places is Wood’s recipe for staying close to the Lord. "I know you are going to come home and Satan is going to work as hard as he can to bring you down, because you are on this amazing spiritual high. There is this battle between who you were and who you are. It’s so easy to come home and fall back into the person you were before your mission.”
Wood further remembered, “I enjoyed reviewing my mission journal and reading the notes in my scriptures. It helps me realize now all the amazing miracles happened on my mission. Why should they stop when I come home?”
McGee saw the blessings of the mission continue afterwards as well. In the last year of his mission, he said he fasted every week. “It had been working and made me happy. Everything that worked in my mission works after my mission. It doesn’t change.”
A distinct problem is the commitment to the following big goal, said Allred. “A reason why a lot of returned missionaries feel kind of purposeless is because they are not married. And that is the next thing.”
He continued, “Marriage is a distinct problem in the Church for young people today. Much worse than it ever was for me. I found it amazingly easy to fall in love and to find somebody with the same values. When I was a campus bishop here, I was amazed by how resistant so many young people are.”
He criticized young people’s fear that interferes with the commandments of the prophets. “The reason young people often don’t have children is that they don’t want to bring children in this ‘terrible world.’ That is the most complete cowardice I have ever heard. When they don’t follow the council of the brethren, it is mostly because of selfishness.”
McGee saw the gospel as an indicator in dating. “When a girl talks negative about the Church – that’s really unattractive.” Wood recommended everyone to do “the same thing that we missionaries would tell our investigators and less actives: To do those small and simple things like reading, studying your scriptures daily, church attendance, partaking of the sacrament, lots of prayer, sanding in Holy Places and listening to the whisperings of the Holy Spirit.”