My Story......The Reason I Came Home From My Mission

Going on a mission was never part of my plan that I had for my life. When I thought about it I always thought that I would be married by 21 and that it just wasn’t in the cards for me at all. That all changed when President Monson made the announcement. I was at work so I didn’t know anything about it until I went home and got onto Facebook and all of my friends who I’d graduated high school with said they were going on missions. I had no idea what was going on but I finally found out that President Monson had changed the age. I felt the Spirit so strongly, but I felt like at the time that I was just overcome with the emotion because of the big change.

In February I kept getting that same feeling, like I needed to go on a mission. I met with my bishop at that time just to see what it would take to start my papers, because I didn’t know, and I ended up starting them right then. Everything worked out so fast and amazingly that it seemed like the Lord wanted me to go really badly.

I got my call April 11^th. That was the longest day of my life because I had to wait till 10:30 pm to open my call. And I was called to serve in the Colorado Fort Collins Mission and I was to report on June 26^th 2013. That was the craziest moment of my life so far because I had no idea how I’d gotten there really, it all seems like such a blur.

After that two month wait into the MTC it was finally my turn to go into the big, scary, MTC. The first day was a big blur because so much has happened in a short amount of time. Now I’m not sure when it exactly started, but I know that my time in the MTC was not the best time because I had a migraine almost the entire time. At one point I had to go to the health center because I had a blinding migraine (something I’ve never experienced before) and I had to get shots in my hips and because of that I had to miss a whole day of classes. I felt like part of it was because I was going through caffeine withdrawals, but I didn’t think that it would be that bad.

When I left for my mission I still had a migraine, but for whatever reason I’m pretty sure that my first day in the field I had no migraine whatsoever. It was gone. That was the most amazing feeling. I thought that I would be able to continue, that I wouldn’t deal with it again for the rest of my mission.

That was very short lived. I got moved to another area my first three weeks out and so in my new area with my new companion I got a migraine one Sunday. I basically just slept that day because I thought that it would go away the next day. Because that’s how it was when I was home and I got a migraine. I’d get it, I’d sleep it off and then it’d be gone. Well this migraine I got on my mission has never gone away.

I dealt with the migraine on my mission from August until January. I did everything that I could on my mission. I tried to be the missionary that the Lord had called, but some days were harder than others. For months I had the question in the back of my mind about whether I should go home or not. I wanted to so I could just deal with all my medical stuff there, but at the same time I wanted to stay on my mission and serve. Finally I called my mission president and just kind of cried to him on the phone that I was sick of being on a mission because of how much pain I was in.

Then finally in January I had an interview with my mission president and I just basically was sobbing because I couldn’t take being there anymore. And he told me to make a decision and then pray about it and see if that’s what the Lord wants me to do.

I was lucky enough that my companion got a temple trip so I was able to pray about it there. And the feeling that I got in one of the rooms of the temple was the most powerful feeling I’ve gotten. I talked to the Lord that day and the Spirit let me know that going home was what I needed to do. So the next Monday I called my mission president and told him that I had prayed about it and I knew for a fact that going home was the right thing to do. I thought that he was going to have me wait till the end of the transfer, because it was a week later, but I went home on Thursday. So less than a week after I told my mission president I was on a plane home.

Yes being home is hard but I know that it’s the best thing that I could have done. I don’t know that I will return to my mission but I miss it every single day and I know that even if those amazing 7 months are all I serve I know that I was accomplishing my purpose.