Comparing.

    One of the things that has been really hard for me lately is all the missionaries coming home. Especially people from my mission and then they add me as a facebook friend. This is one of the hardest things because I have spent about 8 months trying to forget my mission. I have been trying to only focus on the positive. These missionaries come from serving the entire time. I feel less then them. They are better then me and they were able to stay the entire time out. I wasn't. They have all of these experiences that I have missed they impacted more lives then I did. Helped more people. When these RMs come home it can make the MRRMs feel horrible.
    I have now fallen into a classic pitfall. Comparing. This is one of the worse things anyone can do and it is totally natrual. We compare ourselves to others. They are smarter, more beautiful, and so on.  As I said in "failure" success is personal. If we compare ourselves to others we only set ourselves up for failure. I do not think that God has a chart of us and another person comparing us. God will always look at were we have come. He will not compare us to the Whole Time Return missionaries. (WTRM). Or to the mom who looks like the supper hero. Or the dad that seems to provide everything for his family.
It is important for us to do our best regardless of others. We each have strengths and we each have weaknesses. It is so important for us to stop comparing ourselves to others. It will make us so much happier.

FAILURE

     When you come home early you feel like a failure. At least I did. It was horrible it was just one more emotion that made its way into my heart. I had not been strong enough or good enough to stay out the entire timed. It was all my fault and I had not accomplished my goal. I was a disappointment to my friends, my family, myself, and God.  As you can Imagine this was a horrible way to feel.
     I had technically failed, I had a not achieved what I wanted.  I saw it as black and white. You go the whole time you succeed you don't you fail. But this was not right at all. We do not all have the same measure of success as any other person. Success for me was even going. It was getting up everyday even though I just wanted to lie in bed. It was pretending to be happy when I wasn't. It was going a whole appointment without saying something stupid. That was what success for me was. For others it was going the whole time, or baptizing a hundred people, or going into a leadership position. But not me, my success looked different then anyone else's. It was mine.
    We all have different abilities and we all succeed in different ways. The only way we can fail is by not trying. Any MRRM did not fail we succeeded to the best of our ability.
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Feeling Betrayed by God

The feeling that overwhelmed me when I came home was betrayal.  I felt like God had betrayed me.  Let me explain this. I was 100 percent sure that I went on my mission when God wanted me to.  But I also knew that God sent me home. When I came home as I have explained it was the worse thing in my life. It hurt so bad and I thought that my heart would explode. There are really no words to describe how upset I was. 

    If I had done what Good wanted me to why did he lead me to this pain. I did everything I was supposed to do but I still got hurt. I felt that God had betrayed me that he had lead me down a road of hurt and if he had  really loved me then he wouldn't have allowed this pain to happen. 

    There was a little while when I was really mad at God for this. I  would barely talk to him. I didn't go to the temple to feel him. I read my scriptures a little but I didn't study them.  But God always waited for me. And Jesus Christ was always there for me.  I realized that I was not seeing the whole picture. Yes, it was horrible but after awhile I began to know that God did not want to hurt me. It pained him to see me upset but he knew what was best for me. He knew that this event would have the opportunity to change my life for the better. 

    Why am I telling you this? Because I felt that God caused me pain and many people feel that way. We have to learn to trust God. And allow him to show us what we can become. We can get hurt because of other's agency or because we made a bad choose or because God had a different plan for us. Just be strong and know that He is God and He loves you. Thought pain we become who God wants us to be.