Remembering the Temple

It has been nearly four months since we went to the temple. It feels like forever ago. This morning I woke up thinking of our trip to the temple because this is the second Sunday in a row that all three of us has been able to attend church together. It is rare that we get to go to church as a family, and even more rare that it happens two weeks in a row. To celebrate this sabbath day, I wanted to tell the story of our journey to the temple.

I’ve mentioned our crazy temple trip a little bit before, but here is the full shebang.

Very early on in planning our trip to the temple, we thought we were going to take a mini celebration trip, similar to our mini-moon after our wedding, and have a little reception back home the following weekend. At the time, we did not realize that we would be in the middle of a major relocation. When the move was scheduled, the reception and celebration trip got canned in a hurry. We didn’t have the money, time or, most importantly, the sanity to make it all happen.

As the summer began, Steve and I started taking a temple prep class that was taught by two of our close friends in the church. It was just the two of us and the two of them while our munckins played together. Those Sunday evenings in our temple prep class were some of the most peaceful and relaxing times during our hectic summer. And, if we did not have that class to look foward to each week, we would have been completely unprepareed for the temple because we were not able to take much time, if any, to prepare on our own.

A few weeks before our trip to the temple, I looked at the calendar and my jaw dropped. The date had crept up us and we hadn’t invited anyone, or reserved a hotel, or anything that organized and responsible people would do. We were neck deep in our move and our trip to the temple had, sadly, gotten brushed to the side. I booked a hotel. Steve and I quickly thumbed through our address books and sent email and text mail invites (isn’t that terrible) to our church friends. We were so stressed and scatter brained that we completely forgot to invite a few people that were near and dear to us. This is for sure one of my most embarrassing social snafus. For anyone that doesn’t believe in the correlation between stress and lapses in memory and concentration, I am living proof that the two go hand in hand.

After the hotel was booked and (most of) our friends were invited, every thing continued to roll along nice and smooth. We were packing, making final preparations for the big move, and we even had time for a quick visit to the beach. After our trip to the beach, our plan was to do nothing but pack and pack and pack until it was time to run to DC real quick  for two days to get our endowments and to be sealed as a family. We were scheduled to leave on Thursday morning, go to the distribution center to and get our endowments that afternoon and then on Friday morning we would be sealed and return to our packing by Friday night.

Friend, things did not go as planned.

Tuesday morning Steve called the temple to see if they had everything in stock that we would need to purchase. No one answered the temple phone and he had to leave a message. Later that day, a temple worker called Steve from his home phone and said that the temple had been closed since the weekend because of a violent thunderstorm that came through the area. No one knew when power would be restored, they were working on alternate power sources but those were not sure if they would work, and until Wednesday they wouldn’t be able to tell us anything more.

Steve and I sat down in the middle of the kitchen floor with packing materials in our hands and leaned against the kitchen cabinets. What were we going to do? We had friends that had driven 13 hours to go  through the temple with us. They had taken an entire week off from work to be with us. We considered switching everytihng over the NC Temple, but we had always pictured being in DC and we had friends up there (including a close friend who volunteered to take pictures for us) who would not be able to make the journey to NC to celebrate with us. We sat on the kitchen floor for a long time feel defeated and helpless. We ate a plate of brownies while we were down, said a prayer and pulled ourselves together. Until we heard from the temple workers on Wednesday there wasn’t much we could do anyway.

Wednesday the temple called to tell us that power had not been restored, but they had generators. They would be able to do a limited number of endowment sessions via generators and the sealings would be performed with lanterns and candles. If the power wasn’t restored would have to come up early on Thursday to be endowed or we would have to do it all on Friday. If the power was restored, we would be able to move along as scheduled. Either way, things would work. We called everyone who was invited and gave them plans A, B, C, D and E.

We prayed and thought about our options. We decided to proceed as if everything was normal. We would leave Thursday morning and plan to go to the distribution center and do our endowments that afternoon, and have our sealing on Friday. If the power was not restored by the time we got there, then we would go to the distribution center and relax for the rest of the evening and do it all on Friday.

We called the temple Thursday morning as we were leaving town to get an update. Power had been restored, but it wasn’t reliable and still cutting in and out. So we would have to do our endowments on Friday, but the distribution center would be open.

The drive to DC was nice. We car pooled with our friends that would be with us in the temple (the ones that drove 13 hours to be with us) so we had a lot to talk about and catch up on. We walked around the temple, went to the visitor center, got the things we needed from the distribution center (they didn’t have much in our sizes because the delivery couldn’t be made with the power out), inhaled our lunch, checked into the hotel, relaxed for a bit, had cheesecake for dinner and then passed out.

Friday we were running a little bit late, so a few parts of our time in the temple were rushed and a blur. However, everything went well during our endowments. Of course I can not say much about the experience except that it was nothing like I expected and everything I expected at the same time. The entire time I thought to myself, “I know this. I belong here.” It was like when you meet someone new or go to a new place, but somewhere inside of you, you already know this new person or place, and you know that this place or person was and is going to be very special to  you. Did I lose you just now?

After we were done with our endowments, we were whisked away to the sealing. As we were waiting to go into the sealing, we found out that Moanna was sick and had thrown up several times on the ride to the temple. Our friends that brought her said that she was doing better and should be able to get through the sealing OK. Other than looking a little pale, she did great during the sealing.

As we were all coming out of the sealing room and deciding where to eat lunch, and if we should take the stairs or  the elevator to get downstairs, the power went out. It hadn’t been Five minutes since our ceremony ended, and no power. We were all left standing in the dark. Thankfully no one had made it to the elevator yet!  I leaned over to Steve and asked if he could believe the timing? And he said, “Of course I can. I asked God to please let the power stay on until we were done with the sealing and after that he could turn it off again.” We know the power going out was God letting us know that he was with us for our special day and that he had heard our prayers. God heard all of our prayers that day because, Moanna threw up once more in the temple after the ceremony was complete. After that, she was perfectly happy and healthy for the rest of the day.

It was such a wonderful journey. It did not go at all as we had planned – at all. However, I am thankful for the challenges that we had to overcome. If the power didn’t go out, we would have thought very little about the temple in the days proceeding our trip. It would have The power outage forced us to think about the temple and make it a priority. It reminded us of how important the trip was to us, and how excited we were to have the opportunity to attend the temple.

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