Touch The Temple

In June, I was in charge of teaching Sharing Time, and the theme for the month was "Priesthood Ordinances and Temple Work Bless My Family". It was such a fun month to teach and one of the weeks, I felt impressed to share a talk I had recently read by President Monson called "Blessings of the Temple". In the talk, President Monson shared the story of a man who took his granddaughter on a special birthday date, but instead of taking her to the zoo or the movies, he took her to the temple where he had her touch the walls and the doors of the temple. President Monson said "She had touched the temple, and the temple had touched her. As we touch the temple and love the temple, our lives will reflect our faith. As we go to the holy house, as we remember the covenants we make therein, we will be able to bear every trial and overcome each temptation. The temple provides purpose for our lives. It brings peace to our souls—not the peace provided by men but the peace promised by the Son of God when He said, “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.”"

At the end of the lesson, I challenged our Primary children to find a time to touch a temple over the summer and then to tell me about it, and many of them have. The girls and I, knowing that we were heading to Utah where temples are everywhere to be found, made a personal goal to touch five temples on our trip. Surprisingly, this turned out to be much more difficult than I had imagined! Several of the temples we stopped by were closed for cleaning, meaning the gates were locked and we were unable to get close enough to touch them. But we still managed to accomplish our goal (though we did have to touch three temples on our drive home to make it happen!)

We started by touching the Twin Falls, Idaho with my best friend KJ and her family. (An entire post about that awesome visit coming soon!)

We then tried to touch the Provo temple (closed!), the Brigham City temple (closed!) and the Salt Lake temple (closed!). We also wanted to touch the Payson temple, but it wasn't completed yet, making that a no go as well.

Towards the end of our trip we made it to the Logan temple and were very excited to finally find a temple with open grounds. We were able to get up to the temple so the wee ones could touch it and admire the beautiful stone and the gorgeous flowers. I could not get enough of the breathtaking view of Cache Valley. Cache Valley might just be my dream home location.

On our drive home from Provo, we managed to touch our final three temples. It was the first day the Provo temple was opened after it's yearly cleaning, so we stopped there first, on our way out of town. Then we hit St George and Las Vegas. Bruce wasn't too keen on that final stop as he was anxious to get home, but I convinced him we needed to do it and the girls were beyond ecstatic when we pulled up and they realized where we were. Even Man Cub had caught on to what we were doing and said "temple", then ran up to touch it's doors.

We are all loving this new tradition of "collecting" temples and we are excited to add several new temples to our list in the coming months. Touching the temple is helping our children to recognize the importance of these sacred buildings, especially when we go out of our way to visit them. They feel the Spirit  as they touch the walls and they are excited to seek out other temples to touch. Touching the temple is certainly touching our lives, and this is only the beginning!