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Jaxon Washburn is a friend of BCC who recently returned from a mission in Armenia.

My name used to be Elder Washburn.

I returned home on May 17th, after returning from my service as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Armenia. My mission was eight months long. Less than a month ago, I had no intentions of coming home. God, I suppose, intended otherwise, and I am doing my best to sort out the pieces.

I loved my mission. To be on a mission is to ground oneself in paradox in many respects. Such was my experience, at least. My mission constituted of a series of contrasts: there were moments where I felt closer to God than I ever had before, and moments where I never felt more spiritually detached. I lived as selflessly as I could, and because of that, I have never been more critically self-aware of all my own flaws and shortcomings. This, the biggest challenge of my life, brought with it the most significant amount of growth, refinement, and development. My mission meant the world to me; it has since my teenage years, when I decided I wanted to serve. To part with it was heartbreaking at best, and I am still working to reconcile my return with the future course of my life.

I never planned on this happening, but I have to roll with it. In this, the Spirit, as well as the support of my loved ones, has been instrumental in my finding comfort, direction, and peace following my decision to come home. For that, I want to discuss the subject of success and honor when it comes to returning from a mission, and particularly how the two should not be confused as synonymous.

The extension of honor and the role it plays in communities, while common throughout various societies in history, can bear negative repercussions if one fails to qualify for it. Honor functions as a marker of loyalty, purity, desirability, acceptance. The act of denying one honor is a deliberate rejection. It places them outside the fold, whether intentionally or not, and sets them apart from the rest of those who are deemed as insiders on account of their legitimate and “honorable” service.

I returned home on an emotional health release, and with it, the avoidance of what would be considered a “dishonorable release”. Since returning, though, I have reflected on the role and utility of honor when it comes to missions and have come to the conclusion that, more often than not, it is an unhelpful label that we apply to missionaries. It can be spiritually harmful in that it tends to pressure missionaries to continue their service even though the better choice would be to end it, all in order to avoid the stigma of dishonor. I realize that my release wasn’t a dishonorable one, but all too often, missionaries have been inclined to believe that anything short of a normal full-term mission constitutes something less-than honorable.



Upon returning, I have found Elder Holland’s Counsel for Early Returned Missionaries, given just prior to a Face-to-Face he conducted in March 2016, to be both comforting and valuable. Particularly, I found solace in his admonition that those whose missions have finished earlier than the anticipated time should cease to qualify their service by the amount of time they served. Instead, he expresses his desire for them see it as no less worthy, helpful, successful, honorable, or deserving of blessings than any other mission.

Success is defined much differently than honor. While out in the field, the standard missionary guide Preach My Gospel qualifies what constitutes a “successful” missionary on the following grounds, stating that:

“You can know you have been a successful missionary when you:

Feel the Spirit testify to people through you.

Love people and desire their salvation.

Obey with exactness.

Live so that you can receive and know how to follow the Spirit, who will show you where to go, what to do, and what to say.

Develop Christlike attributes.

Work effectively every day, do your very best to bring souls to Christ, and seek earnestly to learn and improve.

Help establish and strengthen the Church (the stake and ward) wherever you are assigned to work.

Warn people of the consequences of sin. Invite them to make and keep commitments.

Teach and serve other missionaries.

Go about doing good and serving people at every opportunity, whether or not they accept your message.”



Personally, I can say that I was certainly not perfect in all the areas outlined— not that the Church is demanding or expecting that. The way in which I strove to “obey with exactness” was intentionally as close as I could get to the kind of obedience I have observed from Christ during His mortal ministry as recorded in the various writings describing His life. The scriptures are replete with examples of Christ practicing, circumventing, ignoring, and/or radically reinterpreting what was considered to be law in His time, whether that was the Law of Moses or various social conventions. The common means by which He approached the law was consistent and qualified by whether or not it allowed Him to more effectively heal, minister, and love those around Him. Wherever the law was obstructive or worse— used as a weapon— Christ showed the Higher Way of how to understand and live it. While I felt spiritually confident on how I conducted myself during my mission, I am sure that others sometimes saw my version of obedience as heterodox.

It was this approach to how to conduct myself as a missionary, coupled with my desire to love others as deeply and sincerely as I could, that defined my mission. I don’t know if I fell within the cookie-cutter mold of a missionary that was often perpetuated, nor do I suppose I ever desired that, but I did love the people I was around, fully and deeply, and did my best to serve them whenever possible. For this, and the ways in which I found my faith to be refined and deepened in the course of my service, I count my mission as a successful one.

Oftentimes, success and honor go hand-in-hand. I’d say this is the case for most missionaries who return. However, their dual attainment isn’t always guaranteed. Consider the following circumstances:



Scenario (1) A missionary serves a full-time mission. They do what is expected but come back unchanged in how they see themselves, their faith, or the world. They are received warmly by their homeward and are able to enjoy the full social benefits of having served full-term.

Scenario (2) A missionary confesses to a transgression while serving and is sent home upon the mission president’s decision. During the course of their service, they loved and served as often as they could, they testified and invited others unto Christ, and they found their time in the field valuable. They are unable to return to the field, even after sincere repentance.

In these situations, which would be considered the successful missionary? Which one returned with honor? Which one should be of the higher importance for us to emphasize as members of the Church?

Success. Honor. We could all stand to be more aware and sensitive to how we frame and use these in our discussions of missionary service. The two terms are certainly not synonymous, and in the case of honor especially, not always helpful. Success and honor, though perhaps believed to be synonymous much of the time, really speak to two different ways of defining one’s service.

The way I see it, success is more contingent on how the missionary perceives themselves while honor seems to reflect more on how others perceive the missionary. At the end of the day, the missionary alone is the one who is able to deem their mission a successful one or not, considering all the qualifications are individual and internal rather than quantitative in nature. Honor, then, constitutes the communal pronouncement on the legitimacy of one’s service. The well-being and spiritual state of those who choose to serve or not serve, those who stay or return early, depends on the values we attach to these labels and how one qualifies for them.

Since returning, I have learned that it is better to qualify one’s mission as honorable contingent on its success, rather than the other way around. Though my return has been deemed an honorable one by my community, what I really value at the end of the day is the confidence I have in the success of the service I rendered. I didn’t baptize anyone on my mission and I served for a shorter period than I anticipated, but I know that I grew, I loved, and I served with all that I had. Ultimately, that knowledge has brought comfort, peace, and fulfillment as real as any that I could have obtained after a full two years.



