2022
8 Ways to Stay Strong after Your Mission
September 2022

Digital Only: Young Adults

8 Ways to Stay Strong after Your Mission

By Marianna and Steve Richardson

If you’re feeling a little lost after returning home from your mission, just remember: your purpose is still the same!

Young adults studying scriptures

Photograph by Christina Smith

After a Returned Missionary Institute class, one sister, who had been home from her mission for only a week, stayed to talk with us.

Since she’d been home, she’d felt lost and alone—without a purpose. She wasn’t sure how to transition into a fulfilled returned missionary.

If you are a returned missionary who feels like this young sister, know that the Lord will “direct your hearts into the love of God” (2 Thessalonians 3:5) and aid you in your specific circumstance as you seek His will through prayer and fasting.

The following are simple suggestions that might inspire and lift you as you transition to being home:

  1. Continue trying to fulfill your purpose to “invite others to come unto Christ by helping them to receive the restored gospel through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and His Atonement, repentance, baptism, receiving the gift of the Holy Ghost, and enduring to the end,”1 inviting yourself to come unto Christ first. Focusing on these five points of the doctrine of Christ can help you find purpose and direction in your life.

  2. Consider applying the principles taught in Preach My Gospel to your returned-missionary life. If you seek to apply its teachings prayerfully and with real intent, the Spirit can show you how this wonderful manual may continue to bless your life. For example, the finding and listening skills described in chapters 9 and 10 can help you find and communicate with new friends and your potential eternal companion.

  3. Recognize how you’ve grown and improved. Friends and family may expect and even encourage you to “go back to who you were.” Don’t do it! You have changed. Retain and strengthen all the positive changes you have achieved, such as learning to use technology wisely, avoiding inappropriate media, and inviting your loved ones to support you and join you as you seek to maintain the uplifting changes you have made.

  4. Continue to establish and follow a daily schedule. Making time each day for personal scripture study and prayer will bless your life forever. You might continue to make back-up plans to include these Spirit-strengthening activities in your day even when life happens (as it always does).

  5. Be “anxiously engaged in a good cause” (Doctrine and Covenants 58:27–28). Set and start working towards long-term goals as soon as you can after your mission. You may even want to establish new “key indicators,” or sub-goals, that you can review each day, week, or month to track your progress toward achieving your bigger goals.

  6. Attend church faithfully. Doing your best to attend every Sunday will help you continue to grow spiritually. Ask for assignments to serve others and minister sincerely to your ward members. Be the kind of member you wanted to work with as a missionary.

  7. Attend institute to strengthen your gospel knowledge and testimony. President Russell M. Nelson has said that actively and faithfully participating in institute “will help you become … a devout disciple of Jesus Christ.”2 Institute is an excellent place to find friends and establish positive relationships. The spiritual and social lift you receive at institute can carry you through the rest of the week.

  8. Choose to make temple attendance an essential priority in your life. You might even want to consider becoming a temple worker. The temple is a place where you can receive essential revelation to guide you in your decision making—inside and outside of the temple.

Your mission was not meant to be the best eighteen months or two years of your life; instead, it was meant to be the beginning of a wonderful, Spirit-filled adult life. We promise you that you can look forward to enjoying even greater, deeper, and more powerful spiritual experiences than those you experienced on your mission as you seek to build on all the knowledge and skills you acquired on your mission.

As you realize and accept that your missionary purpose and your life’s purpose are the same thing, you will not hurry as some do, to “get back to normal” after your mission. Instead, you will strive to make your missionary self your new normal!