Oh hey Taylor! Thats a good question, what is it like to be a returned missionary? Well, since I've got a few, why don't I enlighten this subject a bit.
First off, the perception of an recently RM is what? Akward, only talks about the gospel, trying to get adjusted to "normal" life again. From what perspective is this? From people that are not recently returned missionaries. Not that they aren't qualified to make this judgment call though, I mean if you think about it, it really is a different world that the missionary has come to and the people there are allowed to decide what is "wierd" or "akward" according to their worlds standards. But as you see, that there is the point, they are in a different world than the missionary. If a green alien showed up at your door and you were like "Bro, you're weird!", he'd prolly say the same about you. This is not just about physical location. Its about everything but physical location. This RM just spent 2 years re-programming his brain. A complete over-write. Tabula rasa. Everything includes just about everything when you think about it. When you see an RM, you're not seeing the same person there that left. "Oh hey! (insert name here) is back! How's it going?" Thats not really logical, from the frame of the RM anyways. What the RM really is is an alien. An alien that just got adopted into the role of your former friend.
Don't think wierd green alien from another planet though, that wouldn't be correct. Think alien as in foreigner. That's better. Imagine your life right now, all your friends, responsibilities, memories, quirks, and morals. Think about them, and realize how integral they are to you, you. Kind of makes up part of your core, you might say, all those things. Now imagine, for a second, that you are now called to take upon you the role of someone else. All of a sudden, it seems, you now have a responsibility and obligation (which is mandatory by the way, not optional) to change who you are. Wow. That would suck right? You might have cried just a little bit right now. Go take a second to wipe the tear off your face. Change who you are? What? Thats...unbelievable. I don't get it. So the RM is a missionary still, who is being asked to become someone else. A missionary is obedient though, this is what God wants the missionary to do, so he/she is willing to do it. But that, switching roles, is not the clincher, what makes the missionary sad is that it is not just anyone that they are supposed to be becoming. They're not supposed to be becoming another missionary. They are supposed to be becoming something that they don't understand and don't really want to be. Let me explain this, as a missionary you are set apart to a higher plane of thought and activity. Jesus Christ becomes the focus, everything. You are special. You are unique. It's not like you look down on everyone else, members and non-members, but I think that in some way, missionaries actually do. You're not really looking "down" on them, more like to the side, you just have a special role in obtaining divine direction to help them in their lives. Thats a pretty legit responsibility. You see, you are aloft from all of this madness that the world is going through. You have a special role in staying away from all of this worldliness, you help clean other people off. You're the guy cleaning the mud of the world off of people. When you go home it seems God is asking you to go stand in the middle of the mud. You're like "why?" Why can't I keep helping people get clean? I stay cleaner that way too. So when you are home now, you are standing in the middle of this giant mud puddle, waist deep. You stand there motionless, you're keeping your arms and hands up out of the mud because you don't want to get any dirtier than you have too. You sadly despise the mud. It seems like a dream. It's not possible that you could have been cleaning other people off that managed to get out of the giant mud puddle, and somehow now you waded out into it! And you are supposed to stay there! It's hard to distinguish from whats mud and what is not. You get home and you don't know what the right thing to do is. You don't have the same purpose and guidance anymore. When you look at your new life as an RM, in the frame of a missionary, everything looks like mud! Communicating with friends, prohibited as a missionary and therefore looks like mud. Consuming social media, listening to popular songs, watching television and movies, they are not allowed as a missionary, therefore they look like mud. You get home and everything looks like mud. Even though you cognitively recognize that these things are no longer wrong, its been 2 years everyday repeating the opposite to yourself. What you feel like is that somehow by partaking in all of these so called "normal" things you are really dishonoring your former life. You're somehow disparaging what kind of a missionary you were. You were the clean missionary, helping people get out of mud, and now you are dumping mud on yourself! Hypocrite! This is what has to change, beating all of these missionary specific things out of you. Its been two years beating them in and now its time to beat them out. But hey guess what? There's no white handbook for when you get home, theres no list of things to beat into yourself. You are involuntarily having these things beat out of you as a result of day to day life and theres no approved list of things to replace them with. You have to choose for yourself. Thats alot harder. What do I do today? Its not focus on helping other people, its focus on helping yourself. 2 years ago you knew how to focus on yourself but now you forgot. You have to re-learn. Thats why RM's are akward. They're just babies. They're learning. Of course they're akward. They have scriptures pop up in their mind for every sentence you say. If you make a statement about the gospel they instinctively want to teach you, quoting general authorities and scripture. They have opinions...about the gospel! Not many about anything else. All those other opinions they forgot. So of course they're awkward, they have nothing to say! If you're not talking about the gospel they are learning more about the world. A world that may seem opposed to the world they came from, but is nonetheless required for them to immerse themselves in. So they may be hesitant, they may shrink, they may not be "normal." But hey, thats okay. They're going to adjust no matter what, its as inevitable as rocky road icecream melting in the hot sun. They'll get better, they will improve. TV won't be a sin anymore, facebook won't look like the plague, and soon they'll develop some opinions, regain a personality and be okay. Its a rocky road but its shorter than it seems.
