Old Temples and Old Friends
February 26th, 2024 by G.
On the sweetness of Our life.
You make one of the last sessions at the old Provo Temple before it all comes down. You have not been there since you were in college many years ago. There are swarms of people. It is a reverent madhouse. You could only wish that it were the old endowment to go with the old temple, for just this once. When you come out at twilight, the lake and the mountains and the clouds mount up in layers of blue and purple behind the dim white of the fountain.
You meet with old friends.
You drive home directly to your stake conference. Old friends there too.
Comments (2)
Filed under: We transcend your bourgeois categories | Tags: on the sweetness of Mormon life
Filed under: We transcend your bourgeois categories | Tags: on the sweetness of Mormon life
February 26th, 2024 07:53:59
seriouslypleasedropit
February 26, 2024
good, and glory
John Mansfield
February 27, 2024
As the temple serving the missionaries in the Missionary Training Center and the students gathered at BYU, the Provo Temple had a special place in the church. Even though most of us received the endowment elsewhere, the Provo Temple was the place we had our first repeated learning experiences with the temple. When I left to preach the gospel in Argentina, I had entered the St. George about a dozen times, most of them for baptisms for the dead when I was a youth, then to receive the temple endowment on my 19th birthday (coincidentally also the day the endowment was first given in Nauvoo.), and one return visit before I was set apart as a missionary. Then over the course of my 8 weeks in the MTC I entered the Provo temple about 15 times. I first learned the temple sealing ordinances there.
Later when I was a BYU student, I had a bishop who encouraged us to attend the temple weekly. I took him up on that and attended most weeks for a couple years. As I was a student, it felt right to also be a student of the temple. When I left BYU, I went to New Mexico, which was in the Denver temple district, and I visited temples about 3 times a year, which confirmed the usefulness of very frequent temple attendance when I was student in Provo. Later when I was closer to temples, I would enter the temple about 6 or 8 times in a typical year. So, when I was 35 yeard old about half of my time in the temple had been in the Provo Temple. Also, I moved to different states a few times until the last move twenty years ago, so it was not until I was about 50 that I had been in one temple (Washington DC) more times than I had been in the Provo Temple.
Something like this experience of mine with the Provo Temple is common to hundreds of thousands of the latter-day saints.