My Family's Comings and Goings: Working on the Temple Grounds

Friday, January 8, 2010

Working on the Temple Grounds

I guess I have to back up further than I thought! Something about having a brand new baby in the house and not enough time to do it all! Here I go back to July.

On July 18th, when Joseph was just three days shy of a month old, our family had the opportunity to participate in a service project with our ward at the Washington D.C. temple to clean up the grounds and do some deep cleaning inside. We decided to make a family activity of it and we all went. Alan and the kids stayed outside and pulled weeds out of the flower beds. Of course the kids didn’t last long but Hailey Shipley, one of the youth there, was wonderful and kept them entertained while Alan worked. Joseph stayed happily in his stroller near Alan for much of the time but he did get a little toasted. Poor little guy – not a month old and he had his first sunburn. But really it was more of a sun kiss because it wasn’t bad. Alan did pretty well keeping him in the shade.

I really enjoyed my opportunity to work inside the temple. It was a neat and spiritual experience for me. The temple has been such a wonderfully cleansing thing for me in my life so to be able to give back to that was wonderful. My job was to wash the thin marble windows in the hallways around the sealing and endowment rooms. When that was done we went downstairs to the annex to wash the big windows there. The annex is the walkway from the entrance of the temple to the temple itself. It had a really amazing effect on me to walk into there. I felt like I’d stepped through the veil to see these people dressed in white cleaning the entrance to Heaven. At least that’s what it felt like. And really that’s what it was. I really felt the spirit of that and that we were truly doing something special for our Father. But not just that but there was a sense of preparation in it too. As if the Lord Himself were to walk into the temple and it had to be prepared for Him. It also made me think of the Second Coming and all the work that is being done to prepare for that – that our cleaning and preparing the temple was symbolic in that way. I don’t know if anyone else who worked that day felt that. I hope so because it was pretty special.

Since we had our children with us instead of leaving them at grandma’s house like we normally do when we go to the temple, there was no need for us to hurry back to get them. So I packed us some food and we enjoyed a nice picnic on the grass at the visitor’s center before leaving.