A Day of Reflection

Today is the Sabbath.  We meet each week in a Sacrament Meeting along with the other missionaries that are assigned to work in this area.  Besides the 120 temple missionaries, we see about 160 site missionary couples as well as about 50 young missionaries (either proselyting or performing) .  That adds up to over 500 active LDS attending Church every week!  If you want to get a seat on a soft pew in the chapel, you need to get there early.  What will it be like when we get inundated with the tourists as well during the summer?  At any rate, we arrived early, got a seat and enjoyed the prelude (played today by Sister Bashaw).  Soon the chapel was full, and “late comers” were going directly to the cultural hall to find seats.  As a result, the reverence in the chapel was quite noticeable.  As things quieted down, I looked up to see if it was time for the meetings to begin.  It wasn’t.  We still needed to wait another 12 minutes for the scheduled time to arrive.  But everyone was in their seat.  Nothing was spoken.  All were in quiet meditation – and so it remained until the time to start actually arrived.  What a time for reflection!

One of the speakers in today’s Sacrament Meeting was a young sister missionary.  In her talk, she quoted a member of the Seventy that attended a stake conference which she had been at.  He stated that “It is easier to attend the temple once a week than it is to go only once a month.  To go once a week requires commitment; while going only once a month is an inconvenience”. The statement caused me to reflect back on an evening almost 19 ½ years ago.  Mom (Becky) and I were in attendance to a Saturday evening session of Stake Conference.  It was January 8^th, 1994.  The previous night we had attended a “Know Your Religion” lecture.  The topic for both nights was interestingly the same: “the blessings of temple attendance”.  Afterwards we looked at each other and commented that the Lord was trying to tell us something.  That night we decided to attend the temple every week for the rest of the year.  Previously, we attended once a month – when it was convenient.  We probably made it 9 to 10 times a year on the average.  It was a commitment we had made with the realization that it would not be easy; we swallowed hard, looked into each other’s eyes and said “We’ll do it”.  Little did we realize that there would be several weeks during the year when the temple would be closed and that we would have to go to a different temple to keep our commitment.  But faithfully, we completed our goal and when January rolled around the next year, we asked ourselves if we should quit – or go on – attending the temple every week.  For the joy that we had gained over the previous months, there was no question in either of our minds.  We wanted to continue in the new course that we had begun.  Now almost 2 decades later, we continue to attend and serve in the temple – which has become the center of our lives.  While on this mission, we attend almost daily – not weekly and we could never be happier in the service that we give. 

Friday afternoon and evening we served in the “Arrival Center”.  That evening, the ward from Quincy (about an hour’s drive away) had scheduled a ward temple night.  About 2 dozen of their youth came to do baptisms.  Their priesthood came to officiate and about two dozen more of their adults came to do an endowment at the same time.  Others also came to babysit while the parents were in the temple.  These kept watch over the children in the arrival center and on the playground not far away.  Although we could not leave until all of them were safely on the road back to Quincy, it was an enjoyable evening mingling with the good people that continue to populate the city of Quincy.  If you will recall it was their ancestors that took in the refugee saints that poured in from Far West and other Missouri settlements over 150 years ago.