Enjoying the Temple, Becoming as a Little Child

When you enjoy the temple, you are becoming as a little child.

Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.

-thus Matthew 18:3 (KJV)

Somehow in the sacrament on Sunday I got to thinking about children’s stories.  A lot of them have a lot of repetition and easily grasped structure.  The Big Bad Wolf huffs and puffs at each house, using the same formula, and we go through a simple three-step progression from house type to house type.  The ending is no sense a surprise, especially because almost always the child has heard the story before.  The child wants the repetition of the same ol’ story they know and love.   Children’s stories often don’t even have a plot structure.  In Goodnight Moon, you say goodnight to things over and over.

The House Built Out of Stone

And there I was in the sacrament thinking about kid stories when the prayer for the water happened, in the exact same way it is always done, using the exact same formula, no plot, no surprises.

Basically, kids’ stories are a ritual.   Sacraments are rituals.  The temple is a ritual.  If you enjoy them, you are letting yourself be as a little child.  You don’t have to enjoy them–participation with faith and reverence is enough.  But eventually you will need to enjoy them or you will not be happy in heaven.  Heaven is a lot more like an old beloved story than it is like a new movie.  You will have to become as a little child.

In heaven, only the stories worth retelling are allowed.

And then I had a vision–not a Vision, nothing miraculous, just something in my mind’s eye–of telestial and maybe terrestrial people happily wandering as adventurers through the infinite variety of creation, never bored, always finding something new.  But the celestial people becoming as large as gods, seeing everything, feeling everything, as large as the universe, and deeply deeply happy because the all of everything was as familiar and belonging to them as the inside of their home.