Marathon Temple Day

Jeff and I felt so blessed to be able to attend the Los Angeles temple together. It turned into a very long day (5 hours total at the temple), but it honestly feels so good to know you are doing good things and serving a lot of people by being there. My mom and Maria were so wonderful to watch the kids for what turned into a nearly all day excursion. We often do not get to do a session together, so it was neat to not only be in the celestial room together, but to be in the place where Jeff proposed and where we were sealed.

We did a session with me doing a DeVore family name and Jeff doing some Baer names. We then had lunch in the cafeteria and it seriously made us so excited. I'm not sure if the food is amazingly good, or we were famished, but the food tasted so good to us. And then they have all these dessert options so it was pretty exciting. Jeff went for seconds and before we went home we had to make one more stop for some goodie and some more Utah mint truffles.

After eating we did some name clarification, which turned out to be much easier than we thought, and then went up to do sealings. We had 22 names between Jeff and me (couples and children), and then we got paired with other people who needed children sealed to parents, so we were there nearly two hours. Jeff's knees have never felt so tired :). Both sealers knew my parents and said great things. One had been the temple president and had been part of the coordinating council with my dad, and he said he is a great man. I thought that was neat to hear. Sarah had prepared the names for Jeff, and Holly, my mom, and Brigham had prepared our names. One of the names was Ruba, which was someone my mom and I found together a couple years ago. When I was sealed for her to her parents, I got emotional as the process was complete and she now had all the blessings she could hope for. There is so much work involved in family history. Finding and preparing the name can take numerous to countless hours, then doing every ordinance takes several temple trips, and often resulting in asking others to help since you can't do everything yourself. It is a labor of love and effort and time, and yet so many are drawn to this work. To me that is what the spirit of Elijah is. People happily doing family history work and feeling this pull and this connection and this drive to do it, when it is so time consuming and not so easily to check off a box and say you are done.

Nathan was doing a session later that evening, so we got out and dropped his clothes at the visitors center for him to pick up 20 minutes later. The man at the desk looked a little unsure of us dropping clothes off, but the sister missionaries were happy to help. The center has been redone for 10 years, but I have never seen it and it was wonderful! I also love the temple grounds, they are absolutely lovely, and I didn't remember the temple being so large!

We truly felt so blessed to have had this special experience and to have been able to enjoy being there together without worrying about childcare. So many neat memories from the start of our journey together as husband and wife.