The Cycle of Temple Growth

It is easy to build enough temples for ordinances for the living. We have saturated that long ago.

It is living the Gospel and raising families where many falter. It is actually applying the teachings and spirit of the temple in the ‘real world’.

I would agree that most of the temples dedicated in the last 15 years have not really changed the ability for living saints to be endowed in the temple, but I disagree regarding being sealed as husband and wife.

It was almost 20 years, I attended my brother-in-law’s sealing in Utah. He and his family were from out of state. The bride’s parents lived in southern end of the Salt Lake Valley, and the late afternoon reception was near their home. For the sealing we drove past the Jordan River and Salt Lake temples to enter the Bountiful temple. Mt. Timpanagos to the south would have been much closer. I was curious why Bountiful was chosen, expecting some preference of the bride, but the mundane answer was that it was the only one with space for them when they scheduled. Another time I entered the Salt Lake temple before dawn to attend a friend’s sealing scheduled for something like 8 AM.

As the many Utah temples have been dedicated since then, I kept in mind that availability for sealing of the living is a capacity limit that the temples were hitting up against.

As my Washington DC temple district has been pared down over the decades, a little fraction of what it had been, I have been a little sad that it is no longer a bustling focal point for a large region. A consolation is that when my sons were sealed there, scheduling limitations were a non-issue. A sense of purposeful hastening is nice, but not in connection with a wedding.

My wife and I were also sealed in the Bountiful Temple. We were both attending BYU, I was from the Jordan River Temple’s district, and she was from Ogden. Everyone else in my family has chosen the Salt Lake Temple for their weddings, but most of them had to schedule some ridiculous early morning time to do so. My wife has never been a morning person, so late morning was more ideal for us, and Bountiful had that.

It was also a nice in-between temple for both families, looked prettier than the other temples in the area (this was back when the Ogden Temple still looked like a birthday cake; my wife never would have considered getting married there), and not going to the Salt Lake Temple satisfied my aversion to doing the trendy thing.

When my mom called the temple to schedule the sealing, she was pleasantly surprised to learn that one of the sealers there was our old family doctor who helped deliver me when I was born. So of course we had him do the ordinance; it couldn’t have been better if we’d planned it that way!

I sure wish more young couples and families would move to the rural midwest! Plenty of temple sealing appts available here. And lots of opportunities to serve in the smaller wards and branches. We need more MP holders and young families!

Huh. This jives well woth Pres. Oaks’s talk Something to think about, I guess.

Did anyone get the vibe that he and the q12 might have felt Pres. Nelson was a bit far over his skis in so many temple announcements that were years early and hadn’t even had sites purchased etc?

No.

No, rather, that was an important and necessary push, and now we need a different push – finishing the building, getting people to the temples and building families.

When the Church needed restoring, we had Joseph. When the church had to trek across wilderness and build a community from scratch, we had Brigham. Each prophet for his own time.