TEMPLES AND MORE TEMPLES

What a week this has been! It’s been so great that we’re just going to have to split it up into several posts. We hope that the writing and pictures will merit your extra attention.

This Monday Mom, Grant, Becca and I went to the Sacramento Temple’s Open House and it was wonderful. It was very nice to meet one of Mom’s friends, Allen, and see our friends Lorna and Peter Schofield. I suppose if one is going to have a problem it should be that there are just too many loved ones and friends to visit with. Such is my case. It had been far too long since I had seen Lorna and her family.

The tour guides said that they expected over 150,000 people to tour the Sacramento Temple before it was officially dedicated and I believe them because there were hundreds of people there at the same time we were. However, the Church is small and we had the good fortune to bump into my good friend Andrew and his fiancée Karina, whom I had never met. Though I have only had a very short time to visit with her, I must say that I have nothing but the best impressions about her and Andrew. They were a very cute engaged couple.

The temple is esthetically beautiful, as you can see thanks to Becca’s wonderful photography, but what makes it special is its dedication to being a reverent place where Heavenly Father communes with His children. We members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints are very fortunate to have so many temples all over the Earth where we can feel closer to the Lord.

I’ll let Becca put in her two cents:

It was a really wonderful experience to go through the temple. We had fun visiting with all of our friends and enjoying each others company. I was so excited to see Andrew and Karina! She is a really sweet girl. I can tell that they love each other a lot!

The next day, Becca got home from work, I ironed a white shirt and we went down south to Fresno to go to an operating temple. It had been a few months since I had been to an operating temple and I feel refreshed after the experience though I have to say that what made it especially memorable to me was seeing my Grandpa and Grandma Boothe working there as volunteers. They are wonderful examples for their posterity and Becca and I love them a lot.

Becca and I in front of the temple in Fresno

Not that we don’t love all of you. You’re on our mailing list for goodness sakes! My Lee cousins live close to the temple but, after much trial and travail, we could not find their house and no one answered the phone when we called. I’d like to go on record and say that the city planning in that neighborhood is more of a maze than a suburb.

All Latter- Day Saint temples are dedicated to God

Wednesday was a work day and I was able to get a bit of translating done, in addition to making my administrators list considerably longer. We had a kick back night and watched Madea’s Family Reunion again. Mom thought the movie was so funny that she bought it! Not a bad purchase. If Becca and I hadn’t bought so many movies over the summer already, we’d buy it too.

Let's hear from the Lovely Becca again:

It was really nice seeing the grandparents again! I always enjoy seeing family members dressed in white in the temple. There is a loving peace that surrounds experiences like that. We were so excited to see the Lee family! We had our Map Quest directions from the temple to their house; They made no sense from the very first direction. We had to go by luck to find the house, and then the house number was nowhere to be found!! So we changed one digit (the logical one to change, because none of the houses had it as a 2^nd number), found the house, and Ryan didn’t remember it. No one answered the phone, so we made our way back home. It was quite the adventure!