Somewhere in the first few months a letter arrives that is shorter than usual, or cheerful in a way that does not sound like them, or simply says it outright. Almost every missionary is homesick at some point, and almost every family at home spends the following week wondering whether they made it worse.
What follows is about what to say. Not how to fix it — you cannot, from here, and trying is most of what goes wrong.
When it usually happens
It is rarely the first week. The first week is adrenaline and logistics, and most missionaries are far too busy to be homesick.
It tends to arrive once the novelty has gone and the routine has not yet become theirs — often somewhere in the first few months, and very often again after a transfer, when a person who had finally built something is moved and has to start the whole business of belonging over again. Holidays do it too, and so does any piece of news from home about something they are missing.
What it actually looks like in a letter
Very few missionaries write “I am homesick”. It shows up sideways, and families often spend two weeks sensing something is off without being able to say what.
- The length drops and the content does not. Same structure, same cheerfulness, half the words.
- It becomes a report. What happened, in order, with nothing of them in it. No jokes, no complaints, no opinions about anybody.
- They ask a lot about home— more questions than usual, and specific ones about people and rooms.
- Something is conspicuously absent. A companion who was in every letter stops being mentioned. That one is worth asking about directly.
It is very often the companion
Homesickness gets the blame for a great deal that is actually about living and working with one specific person, every hour, with no way out of the room.
A missionary in a difficult companionship is lonely in a way that looks identical to missing home from the outside, and they are usually reluctant to say so, because it feels like telling tales about someone they are supposed to be serving with.
Ask about it neutrally rather than sympathetically — “what is your companion like to live with?” gets further than “is your companion being unkind?”, which invites them to defend him. If it is genuinely bad, that is squarely the mission president’s business, and companionships get changed for exactly this reason.
The three things that make it worse
“Everything’s fine here, don’t worry about us”
Said kindly, and heard as: nobody needs me, and nothing is different without me. A missionary already suspects life at home has closed over the gap they left. Telling them it has is not reassurance.
Say the true version instead. We are all right, and it is strange here without you. Both halves.
“Just work harder and it’ll pass”
Sometimes true, and it still lands as: what you are feeling is a discipline problem. Somebody who is already exhausted hears an instruction to be more exhausted, and the next letter gets shorter rather than more honest, because honesty cost them something last time.
“You can always come home”
This one is the hardest, because it is said out of pure love and it is usually the single least helpful sentence available. It converts a bad week into a decision, and a decision has to be made over and over again from then on.
If they genuinely want to talk about coming home, that conversation is theirs to open — and when they do open it, it deserves a real answer rather than a reflex in either direction.
What to say instead
- Name it without alarm.“That sounds like a genuinely hard couple of weeks.” Being believed is most of what they wrote for.
- Tell them something ordinary about home.The dog, the car, what the neighbor said. Not the highlights — the texture. It is proof the place they are homesick for still exists in the dull way they remember it.
- Ask one answerable question.“What is your apartment like?” beats “how are you really?”, which is a question nobody can answer in a letter without writing an essay they do not have time for.
- Say what you see in them.Specific, not general. “You have never once quit anything that was hard” is worth ten of “we’re so proud of you”.
- Remind them it moves. Nearly everyone who writes this letter writes a different one six weeks later, and they have no way of knowing that from inside it.
Sentences, if you are staring at a blank reply
Most people reading this know roughly what they want to convey and are stuck on how to start. These are not scripts to copy out. They are the shape of a reply that works, which is almost always shorter and more concrete than the one people try to write.
When they sound flat but have not said why
“That letter sounded tired. You don’t have to explain it if you’d rather not. The washing machine has started making the noise again and nobody can work out which setting does it. What’s your apartment like?”
One line that says you noticed, one that lets them off answering, one piece of ordinary home, one question they can answer in a sentence.
When they have said outright that it is hard
“I believe you, and I’m not going to tell you it’s fine. You have never once walked away from something because it got difficult — not with the job, not with the leg. I don’t think that has changed. I’m proud of you this week in particular, not in general.”
Specific evidence about who they are beats encouragement every time. Encouragement can be said to anybody; evidence can only be said to them.
When they ask whether you would be disappointed
This question is almost never really about your disappointment. It is them checking whether they are still allowed to be a person if the thing does not work out.
“No. Not in any version of this. You are not out there earning your place back here — you already have it, and nothing that happens in the next eighteen months changes that. That’s true whether you finish or you don’t.”
When they say they want to come home
This is the sentence families dread, and the instinct is to answer it immediately in one direction or the other. Both immediate answers are usually wrong.
Saying “come home, we’ll sort it out” makes a permanent decision out of what is sometimes a bad couple of weeks. Saying “you can’t, think what people will say” teaches them not to tell you the next true thing. The useful reply does neither.
- Take it seriously out loud.“Thank you for telling me. That took something.” They have been sitting on it for a while.
- Ask what changed.Not why they want to come home — what is different now compared with a month ago. The answer is often a specific thing that is fixable: a companion, an area, an injury, a week with no sleep.
- Separate the feeling from the decision. Wanting to come home and deciding to come home are different, and it helps enormously to say so. A person is allowed to want it for months and stay.
- Point them at the mission president.Not as a threat and not as a way of handing the problem on. They have options a family does not know about — a change of assignment, time to rest, real medical support.
- Do not make the decision for them, in either direction. Whatever happens next, they have to be able to say it was theirs.
Holidays, birthdays and the rest of the calendar
Difficult dates are predictable, which makes them one of the few parts of this you can get ahead of. Christmas, their birthday, a sibling’s wedding, the anniversary of something.
The thing that helps is arriving early rather than on the day. A letter that lands the week before, saying you know it is coming and you are thinking about it, does more than a long call on the day itself. Being anticipated is the opposite of being forgotten, which is the actual fear underneath most of this.
The rest of the house, and you
Two things that get left out of guides like this one.
Siblings have their own version of it and are usually not asked. A younger brother who has lost the person he talked to is grieving something, and he is also watching the whole house orbit the missionary every week. Letters from siblings are frequently the ones missionaries say meant the most, and they almost never happen without somebody suggesting it.
You are allowed to find it hard. Parents routinely decide they have to be the steady one, which is reasonable in the letters and unreasonable everywhere else. Talk to somebody who is not your missionary. The people who manage this best are not the ones who feel it least.
And be careful what you broadcast
A hard letter is theirs, not yours. Posting about it, or telling the ward how worried you are, has a way of getting back — and the cost is not embarrassment, it is that the next letter is cheerful and false. Keep what they tell you where they put it.
Write it, even if you also say it
Since families have been able to talk weekly, most of this gets said on the call, which is the natural place for it — and then it is gone.
A letter can be read again on a bad Thursday. A call cannot. If there is one practical thing to take from this page, it is to put the thing you said out loud into writing as well, the same day, even in three lines. Missionaries keep those. Plenty of them will tell you years later which one they kept.
There is more on the writing itself in what to write to a missionary, and on the weekly call in calling and video chatting your missionary.
When it is more than homesickness
Homesickness comes in waves and the letters in between sound like them. Some things do not look like that, and they are worth taking seriously rather than waiting out:
- Flatness that does not lift between letters, for weeks.
- Sleep, appetite or health changing, and staying changed.
- Letters that stop sounding like a person — dutiful, short, with nothing in them.
- Anything about not wanting to be here at all, in any wording.
If you are seeing those, contact the mission president’s office. That is what it is for, they would far rather hear from you early, and missions have access to real support. You are not going over anybody’s head and you are not making a fuss.
What it looks like on the other side
One thing worth holding on to while you are in the middle of it: the overwhelming majority of this passes, and it does not pass by anybody doing anything clever.
What usually happens is unremarkable. A transfer, a companion they get on with, a week where something goes well, and the letters come back. Looking at a whole mission afterwards, the hard stretch that occupied a family for two months is frequently four or five letters in the middle of a hundred — and reading them in sequence, with what came after, is a completely different experience from reading them one at a time as they arrived.
That is also the argument for not deleting them. The flat letters are the ones families are tempted to leave out later, and they are the ones that make the rest of it mean anything.
The short version
- It is normal, it peaks after the novelty goes, and transfers restart it.
- Do not say everything is fine here, do not say work harder, do not offer the way out unprompted.
- Believe them, tell them something dull about home, ask one answerable question.
- Write it down as well as saying it. The letter is what keeps.
- If it is not lifting, call the mission office rather than waiting.