After Coming Home: Finding My Faith in Jesus Christ

I came home from my mission, and I felt like a failure.

At first, it wasn’t so bad. I was distracted by missing the mission and then by being home with family and catching up with friends, getting ready for school and moving into a new apartment and ward. But once I settled into a steady rhythm, the thoughts bubbled up:

I could have done more.
What I did wasn’t good enough.
I didn’t make a difference.
I wasn’t the missionary I wanted to be for my family.
I wasn’t the missionary I wanted to be for God.

I was overwhelmed by the feelings of regret and failure. When I started my mission, I had wanted nothing more than to be a successful missionary. My older brother, Austin, had served his mission in Madrid, Spain, and every week, I would read his miracle-filled emails and wanted to be just like him. When I got my mission call to Rome, Italy, I was excited to make a difference. I envisioned unprecedented baptisms and reactivation and inspiration to missionaries and members alike. I wanted to be the sister-missionary reincarnation of Ammon and Alma the Younger. I believed that God would use me to perform mighty miracles.

A year and a half later, I was home, and my mission was nothing like I had expected. I saw no baptisms of anyone I taught. I rarely even had progressing investigators. Too many times to count, what began as great prospects ended in vacant houses and unanswered phone calls. I saw miracles in the lives and work of other missionaries, so I still believed God was a God of miracles—I just couldn’t figure out why He never gave one to me. All I could understand was that I hadn’t been good enough. All I could fathom was that I had not measured up, that I had not given what it took to qualify for wonders from heaven.

I felt unbearably heartbroken. How could I have served a whole mission and only have these corrosive feelings as my memento? I knew that I had learned more. I believed that there must have been a purpose and that even where I had made mistakes and failed, that Jesus Christ could transform those weaknesses into strengths.

Though I wrestled with these heart-wrenching questions, I never doubted that God loved me. I knew that He heard my prayers and understood exactly how I felt. What was more, as I took Sister Dew's challenge to engage in the wrestle, I knew that my Heavenly Father saw the whole picture and could help me to see more too.

As I began to ask, seek, and knock, a scripture I had read and heard a thousand times penetrated my heart and mind in a way it never had before. In Alma 32:21, the prophet Alma taught me that having faith at this moment in my life meant to "hope for things which [I could not see], which [were] true." Hope that I had not failed. Hope that some good had come of my efforts. Hope that I could still be a valuable and contributing disciple of Jesus Christ. Hope that my imperfections and mistakes could be washed away and that I could be made whole.

How? How could I develop that kind of faith that would bring that kind of hope and subsequently peace? Alma said that I needed to plant the word in my heart and then nurture it like a seed. While one clear interpretation of that direction was to immerse myself in the scriptures and the words of God's prophets, another interpretation seemed just as essential. The Gospel of John talks about the Word, not just in the sense of prophetic revelation recorded in scripture, but as another name for Jesus Christ Himself.

So Alma's invitation became an invitation to plant Christ in my heart, to nurture my relationship with and understanding of Him. As I continued to study Alma 32 and implemented his counsel on nurturing the Word in my heart (all pieces that I'll be writing about here soon :)), I was filled with exactly the hope that Alma promised came as an underlying principle of faith. Its central source was in my study of the Book of Mormon that led me to promises of the redemptive and healing power of Christ: 2 Nephi 2:6-8; 2 Nephi 25:23, 26-27; 2 Nephi 26:24, 33; Enos 1:5-8; Mosiah 3:17; Mosiah 4:2-3; Mosiah 16:8-9; Alma 7:11-13; Alma 36:17-20; and so many more!

As I read these promises and truths, praying for healing of my own, my hope grew more and more sure that these promises were for me too. They weren't just for the people I had taught on my mission who had never heard them or just for those who had served "better" missions than I had. These promises were for Anika Argyle, recently returned missionary, struggling to find herself.

Jesus Christ took upon Himself my debts, my failures, my weaknesses and faults. He walked every step of my mission with me, the good and the bad, the joy and the sorrow, and now He asked me to let Him take the pain and the sadness and the hurt. He had shouldered it all to begin with—I didn't have to anymore. He had better things in store for me.

Have you ever been backpacking? With one of those backpacks that weighs half as much as you do? No matter how well-strapped, there is nothing like the relief of taking it off and dropping it to the ground. The lightness of letting that burden go is a freeing experience. Multiply that infinitely and then translate it spiritually, and that's where I was. After months of carrying around a suffocating sense of guilt and failure that not only trapped me in the past but weighed darkly on my future, I was finally ready to hear what Christ had been saying: "Let me take care of that."

So I let it go. And He did. He already had.

Then He sat with me, walked with me, and showed me that He had a future for me. A future full of light and joy. No, not necessarily easy or painless, but He promised to be there through it all. He promised that He'd help me unload anytime and every time I strapped on that backpack again. He would never leave me "comfortless."

Jesus Christ has become everything to me. He has given me hope and vision and the promise of a fulfilling future as I draw near to Him. He forgives, He heals, He lifts, and He builds us up beyond anything we could even aspire to on our own.

"God be thanked for the matchless gift of His divine Son."

Anika