I love having a summer birthday! It's always sunny, which makes me happy and which also means that I can typically plan for something really great to do. This year I chose to celebrate my day by taking my two oldest kids to the LDS temple in Portland, OR. At age 12, church youth are welcomed within certain sections of the temple to provide service and I was eager to take our freshly minted 12 y.o. and his slightly more seasoned, older sister there with us.
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| Portland, OR. LDS Temple. Stunning, right? |
Let's rewind just a bit. Remember my previous blog post about change? Written in there somewhere, I extended to you a challenge to take while watching our church's General Conference. The promise was that if you watched those inspired, spiritually uplifting conferences with a question (or two or three) that you really, truly, and maybe even desperately needed some guidance on, that you would be touched in some way by the words of the speakers and find your answer.
Here's a little return and report and I'll show you how my birthday, this past week, was the final culmination of a miracle and fulfillment of that challenge.
One of the questions that I had was regarding what I needed to do to continue to help my family to grow and be spiritually prepared. The feelings and responses from the Spirit were undeniable over that Conference weekend. I look back on my notes taken over the course of those two days in April, and in three places I found the answer. I needed to take my older children to the temple as a family to do temple service for our deceased family members as soon as my son was old enough to go. This act would create priceless memories for my children as well as make the temple and its purpose be a building block of their faith from an early age.
"Excellent," I thought to myself. I can totally make this happen. All I needed was for the boy to turn 12, the husband to be free from work, and some family names of deceased relatives to take with us. Easy, no? Sure, unless you happen to be of Italian heritage with very little success in finding anything out about your genealogy thanks to inaccessibility to Roman-Italian records. (If you'd like to learn more about why we take names with us to the temple, check out this link: https://www.lds.org/topics/family-history/purpose-family-history-work?lang=eng)
For those of you that know me well, you're well acquainted with my determination and ability to make things happen. You may also realize at this point from my blogging stories that if I feel inspired to do something and I know it's from God, I'll act on it. I keep putting God to the test and He keeps showing up...or maybe it's the other way around. Regardless, we're a good team.
The month of May was spent asking for help in prayer to be able to find more family names to bring with us. June had me cramming in genealogy research sessions from home in spare minutes here and there with zero payoff. But I was determined and knew from previous experience that if this was indeed what we needed to have happen, that things would work out.
This past Monday, just 3 days shy of our trip, I had a whopping four names to bring with us (I was aiming for ten). Though slight progress, I was ready to resign myself to the fact that we'd miss our goal and have to take additional family names with us belonging to other church members. At least we'd be helping someone out and still be able to fulfill the goal of getting ourselves there.
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| Photo Credit |
Well wouldn't you know it, amidst the chaos of a family dinner that night, I had the distinct impression to get back online and start looking through some of the family names recorded online from previous temple trips. As I did, one particular name stuck in my mind. As I looked up her information, I discovered that there had been an error in the program for the website that I was using and that this individual's personal information was recorded online, but had never been taken to the temple. Hooray! We were now up to five names. Half-way there.
A few more minutes spent digging around in old paperwork that I had looked at a good 100+ times over the years produced two more family names. Could it be? I had combed over those records repeatedly over the years. REPEATEDLY! Two names were there that I had never noticed before. We were now up to 7 names and as close to ten as we'd get by Thursday morning. If any of you reading this have ever struggled in doing genealogy, you'll appreciate how exciting this was and truly, how miraculous these finds were for me/us.
But if you think that's pretty fabulous, then you'll love this. The folks that schedule the appointments at the temple had sent me an email several weeks earlier to confirm our appointment time. I had understood 7:45 P.M. and after yet ANOTHER spiritual nudging, I looked that email up the night before our date only to discover that it was 7:45 A.M. Yep, had I not checked, we would have gotten there at night and completely missed our appointment. The temple closes for annual cleaning for the following three weeks. We would have missed our chance to go due to a last family trip planned at the end of August and school right on its heels. A little miracle. My husband had coincidentally taken the day off for my birthday, so we were able to get kids out of bed at 6 a.m and be on our way.
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| Happy Birthday to ME! |
So, we made it. We went to the temple as a family (minus the youngest). We had our own deceased family names to bring with us whose temple work we performed in the temple that morning. My oldest beamed and the little man clearly felt something special was going on around him there that day. Mission accomplished or really, just started. This is the start to something really grand for them and for us. The temple holds so much significance for me. It truly is a house of God; a place where I have had prayers answered and God's will revealed in my life. I'm so grateful. I may even have shed a tear or two. Afterall, it was my party...and I can cry if I want to. :)
Until next time!
~Arianna
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