Jordan River Temple

7 April 2018

Bob and I have started joking that it must be nearly time to go home because we've finally risen to our level of incompetence. Somehow, we both managed to misplace documents we'd be working on and ended up having to recreate them. I had extra notes on the paper I lost so keep hoping I didn't forget anything important. Bob at least had a back-up resource to help him with reconstructing his. We ended the day on a much higher note, though. 

Yesterday, we attended the open house for the Jordan River Temple. Wow! What a magnificent building!!

To give you an idea of size, this temple has 16 sealing rooms. (Our Raleigh temple has two.) We loved being able to see this beautiful House of the Lord. 

After the open house, it will be rededicated in late May, and then we have plans to attend a session here, with others in our mission zone, in early June.

Following our hour in the temple, we stopped for dinner, then, decided to explore a nearby sporting goods store called Scheels. Wow! We'd never been in a Scheels before. Calling it a sporting goods store is a little like saying Wegmans is just a grocery store. We had fun just looking around.

They have an aquarium you can walk under and around. We saw a "Dory" fish (among many others) and took a picture of the woman who has the job of cleaning the tanks.

 

They also had an enormous display of stuffed wild animals. There were deer, foxes, bears, turkeys, moose, mountain goats, raccoons, pheasants, and many, many other animals.

 

On another note, I'm going to include a story that Elder Barry shared with us this week. (He and his wife serve in our zone.) It's a wonderfully uplifting story about an experience their family had with being blessed by paying their fast offerings. Elder and Sister Barry have been focusing on recording and sharing special memories on their FamilySearch accounts, and we're glad he shared this one with us!

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Elder Barry's Fast Offering Story

Dec 2, 1984 (5 Sundays that month). We had 6 small children at home. (Brooklynn would not be born for another 11 years.) All the money we had left on hand was $15. I had worked for two different companies that year and both had declared bankruptcy, so we hadn’t had much in the way of wages and I was out of work.

Our penny jar was empty and the only money we had left was $15. I asked Brenda Sunday morning if we should pay our fast offerings this month or should we buy a Christmas tree tomorrow. We were the poor, why should we pay our fast offerings? Perhaps we were exempt. . . We had always tried to pay a generous fast offering, but this $15 is all we had left.

We decided to pay our Fast Offering that Sunday in December. As I handed the tithing/fast offering envelope which contained our “Mite” to the member of the bishopric, our home teacher, and as he inserted it into his suit pocket and gave me a handshake; well, at that moment a miracle started to happen. The windows of heaven were unlocked.

As we drove home from church that day and clicked on the garage opener, there was a Christmas tree standing in our garage. A nicer tree than we could have purchased. And that was just the beginning. On television that night George Bailey must have been seen on “It’s a Wonderful Life” by many of our neighbors because the cry went out: “John and Brenda are in trouble.”

Our stake President came over that night, President Charles Daulquest, and his wife. He asked us, “Can you helps us out?” and we say, “Sure, President.” He then gave us an envelope full of money from his own pockets. I was a bit confused about how we were helping him out by accepting money from him, but, have since learned what that means.

Then our home teacher came over ‑ the same person I had given the envelope to at church ‑ he also gave us some money. Then our Bishop came over and handed us a check from the ward Fast Offering account. I believe he gave us back everything we had paid that year.

I don’t think the right hand knew what the left had was doing. The following morning there were two more anonymous envelopes in our mail box each with more money.

It was during this same time frame that our car engine had frozen when the freeze plugs burst. Luckily, we had two cars but with no money I was forced to repair the engine by myself in our cold garage ‑ with some direction from our next-door neighbor and a book from the library.

Later this same week our other home teacher stopped by our home and asked me to take a ride with him. He drove me to his bank and we both walked up to the ATM machine and he asked me to push the buttons for how much cash I needed. I told him that I could not do that, and so he pushed the buttons and gave me the cash and told me if I ever need any more money we would do this activity again.

Well, that week ended. The car worked, after a month of working on it, and two brothers in the ward offered me jobs, one full time and one, part time. I took both of them. The windows of heaven opening might not happen as dramatically to others as this did to our young family, but I bear witness that paying our tithes and offerings, which I have always done, is a blessing to all of us.