In the Bible Dictionary we read: “A temple is literally a house of the Lord, a holy sanctuary in which sacred ceremonies and ordinances of the gospel are performed by and for the living and also in behalf of the dead. A place where the Lord may come, it is the most holy of any place of worship on the earth. Only the home can compare with the temple in sacredness.”
I feel it is a wonderful blessing to be living here in Rexburg during the construction and opening of a new temple. I love the temple. I love the Idaho Falls Temple. I love all of our temples. How did I come to love the temple? Let me share a little bit about my experience with you.
My mother taught me as a child the importance of my parents’ temple marriage that sealed our family together for eternity, and she taught me the importance of living right and finding the right guy so that I, too, could be married in the temple when I grew up. One day when I was about five years old, I said to my mother, “If a man ever asks me to marry him, I will first ask him if he is a Mormon.” She laughed and explained that it probably wouldn’t be a stranger who would ask me to marry him, although it turned out almost to be true. When that proposal came, I did know that he was a Mormon because I had found him in my ward at BYU; but he was pretty nearly still a stranger when one week after meeting we first started talking about marriage! We were married nine months later in the Salt Lake Temple.
In 1969 Marsha, my younger sister, died at the age of 19. At the time of her death my older sister, Marlene, was on a mission in Norway. It was hard to imagine how Marlene would respond to getting the news of Marsha’s death, and it was hard to mourn as a family without Marlene with us. But my parents were able to get the sad news to her in a timely way, and shortly we received a letter from her describing a dream that she had.
Marlene dreamed she was sitting in the temple. Through the windows on one side of the temple she could see people working. She recognized the husband of one of our cousins there. (He had just finished building his young family a new house when he died in a tragic accident.) In her dream Marlene could see him working on a building. She didn’t recognize others working there, but she believed that many of them were ancestors. As she attempted to move closer to the windows for a better view, she heard a tapping noise coming from the other side of the temple. She turned and looked outside the window on that side where she saw Marsha, the sister who had just passed away. Once Marsha had Marlene’s attention, she pointed through the temple to the people working outside the other side of the temple. Marlene recounted that she awoke then with the distinct impression that Marsha had just asked her to do her temple work so that she could join those relatives who had already been through the temple in the work they were doing.
Hearing of this dream was very comforting to me. The idea that life after death involves activity and work projects was new to me, and it made me happy to think of Marsha joining other deceased family members in their work. She had always been one to eagerly participate in work projects of every kind on the farm, and I knew she was going to be happy. The temple was her gateway to that happiness.
A few years ago another dream of family in the spirit world involved a temple. Within weeks of my father’s death, a friend of his from our home town also passed away. This friend’s son, Mike, had leased my father’s hay fields and was keeping an eye on the property my parents had vacated five years previously. Mike, while grieving his father’s death, had a dream. In the dream he went to my father’s farm to check on things. As he looked across the fields, he saw an old red pickup out in one of the pastures. Thinking strangers had broken through onto the property, he started walking across the field and into the pasture toward the pickup to see what was going on. The pickup started up as he approached, and the men inside motioned for him to follow them. He then recognized the pickup as one my Dad had used on the farm. The men inside, dressed in white, were my dad and Mike’s dad. They drove toward the house, parked, and got out of the pickup. As Mike watched them walk up to the house he realized that it was not a house they were entering, but a temple.
I think an important message for me from Mike’s dream has been to recognize that the home where I grew up, like a temple, was a sacred and holy place. I had not thought so living in the midst of the nitty-gritty of life on the farm; but truly the work done there, in spite of its worldly setting, was sacred and holy—the work of building an eternal family. Like the definition in the Bible Dictionary says, “Only the home can compare with the temple in sacredness.”
I have wondered whether there is more to understand from the two dreams. Could there be temple building taking place on the other side of the veil? We know that temple work has to be done here for those who have died, but could they be building for the Millennium? My sister needed her temple work done to be engaged in the building taking place there. And my dad and his friend entered a temple there.
Let me read to you two scriptures that have helped me with my thoughts about the work taking place in the spirit world. The first is from Ether, chapter 13:
. . . Ether . . . truly told them of all things, from the beginning of man; and that . . . this land . . . became a choice land above all other lands, a chosen land of the Lord; . . .
And that it was the place of the New Jerusalem, which should come down out of heaven, and the holy sanctuary of the Lord.[1]
The second is from Moses, chapter 7:
. . . I shall prepare, an Holy City, that my people may gird up their loins, and be looking forth for the time of my coming; for there shall be my tabernacle, and it shall be called Zion, a New Jerusalem.
And the Lord said unto Enoch: Then shalt thou and all thy city meet them there, and we will receive them into our bosom, and they shall see us; and we will fall upon their necks, and they shall fall upon our necks, and we will kiss each other;
And there shall be mine abode, and it shall be Zion, which shall come forth out of all the creations which I have made; and for the space of a thousand years the earth shall rest.[2]
Truly in these two scriptures there is a message of preparation for the Second Coming of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and His Millennial reign. These preparations that have been taking place from the beginning of time will come together “out of all the creations which I have made” said the Lord. The idea of preparations coming down from Heaven makes me believe that the work being done on the other side of the veil is in preparation for the Millennium. My ancestors are engaged in the work.
The coming together of our preparations, their preparations, the coming down of the new Jerusalem and Enoch’s city will be the ultimate experience of love and joy. Imagine as the Lord described being there where, “we will receive them into our bosom . . . we will fall upon their necks, and they shall fall upon our necks, and we will kiss each other[!]”
Hope to be there gives me a renewed desire to be diligently and urgently engaged in temple work and all that supports the work there. I feel that my link to my ancestral family is strengthened when I go to the temple. Even if the work I do there is not for a family member, I believe the act of joining them in the work strengthens the sealing links that bind us, the work of building for eternity in preparation for the Second Coming.
I leave you with my testimony that the Lord has given us a wonderful blessing to have a temple here and that our work in it is essential to the building of Zion. In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.
Notes
[1] Ether 13:2-3
[2] Moses 7:62-64