Tomorrow the Re-dedication
Tomorrow morning our Washington DC temple will be re-dedicated. It closed in the spring of 2018 for two years of renovation and another two years of waiting out COVID-19. I remember going to the temple one last time with Elizabeth that spring four years ago. During that rollercoaster year, that was one of the periods that was looking up. Elizabeth went to the temple one more time in the summer. A dead friend’s mother had given Elizabeth permission to perform ordinances for the friend in the temple, and Elizabeth’s sister took her to the Philadelphia temple.
I had been looking forward to having our temple back, but I did not have strong feelings about the re-dedication itself. This week that changed for me. Our stake presidency had encouraged us to prepare for the re-dedication by doing a few things, including reading the dedicatory prayer performed by President Spencer Kimball in 1974. We did so as a family over two evenings. I had hoped that this would be a good aid to understanding the purposes of the temple, and it was that. President Kimball was half-way into his prayer before he got to what we might quickly identify as a temple’s purpose, to provide specific ordinances for the living and the dead.
What I did not expect was the power I felt when President Kimball toward the end of his prayer asked Our Holy Father in Heaven to bless the walls, the floors, the roof, the elevators, the pipes and wires, the furniture, the oxen, the embroidery and needlework, and many more named appurtenances. I was so glad that my family had earlier in the year read again the second half of Exodus where the tabernacle is detailed. Its tapestries, instruments, taches and sockets, boards and bars, scarlet and blue, a bell and a pomegranate, a bell and a pomegranate, shittim wood overlaid with gold. All that physicality detailed so that Moses could finish his work, and then a cloud could cover it and the glory of the Lord could fill it.
I also felt fortunate that the church’s reading of the Old Testament this year had led us to also remembering the dedication of Solomon’s temple and the restoration activity in Ezra. Tomorrow morning will be glorious.
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G
August 14, 2022
How did it go
Ugly Mahana
August 14, 2022
It was wonderful. Even watching remotely.
E.C.
August 14, 2022
Congratulations! A temple dedication is always a wonderful event, and a re-dedication even better, when it is a temple one has known and loved for years, and waited to enter again.
Mike A
August 14, 2022
Thank you for sharing. One of the highlights of my life was when we dedicated the Oquirrh Mountain Temple in Utah. I helped usher, clean, worked security, and handed out cookies during the open house. I then sang in the dedicatory choir. It was heavenly.
John Mansfield
August 15, 2022
One piece from yesterday: In the morning I reviewed with my children a few things about the re-dedication, and I showed them video of Russell Nelson leading the Hosanna Shout in General Conference two years ago. I told them it’s a shout, so speak clearly and loud enough that people five feet away will hear you well. When I finished with my children I wrote to my quorum, “Remember today that it is the Hosanna SHOUT, so no muttering it.” Before walking in for the first session of the re-dedication I had a reply from an elder thanking me for that message. I shared it with those around me, and one said she had talked with her children about the Hosanna Shout. She had been disappointed by the “robotic” quality of the shout at the dedication of the Manhattan temple, and she told her children to look past any dull performance of her fellow saints and remember various songs they knew that include cries of “Hosanna!”
The Seventy who led the shout had the measure of the thing, and when he demonstrated the shout, he shouted, and following his lead, so did the saints. Any one of us could have been heard 105 feet away.
Our sessions of re-dedication were at 10:00, 1:30, and 5:00. It was a day of fasting for me which I didn’t want occupied with any other significant thing, and as the afternoon moved along, I calculated that though the stake center was packed full for the first session, there would be few who would choose to be there at 5:00, so I returned for the last session. In that session, the shout was led by Elder Sikahema, who knows something about glorious celebration. I am glad President Nelson instructed those Seventy to shout in the temple.