Skip to main content

Temples in the Past Year

I live 478 miles from the nearest temple.  That is nearly the same distance between my home in American Fork, UT and Flagstaff, AZ.  My nearest temple is the Taipei, Taiwan temple.  Other 'nearby' temples are Korea, 562 miles away; Okinawa, Japan, 610 miles; and Hong Kong temple, 746 miles away (Hong Kong is our designated temple).  All of them require a flight (although we *could* take the train to Hong Kong, but it is an 8-hour train ride).  Getting to a temple is expensive and takes planning way ahead.  Yet, miraculously, in 2024, we have been to the following temples:

Tokyo
Hong Kong
Vancouver, BC
Mt. Timpanogos
Saratoga Springs
Taylorsville
Orem
St. George
Red Cliffs
Newport Beach
Layton
Seoul, Korea
Bangkok Thailand

Temple attendance is of highest priority to me.  I'm beyond thankful for these miraculous opportunities. I will share one unique experience.  While preparing to do initiatories in the Seoul temple, I let FamilySearch generate names for me.  The ones that came up were shared by someone in the Shanghai District, but they were Japanese names.  While in the temple, the ordinances were spoken in Korean, I was reading the English text, doing Japanese names for someone in a district in China.  It was a majestic and unique opportunity in gathering Israel.  

In addition to the temples above that we entered and did work in, we were able to also visit:
Lindon
Salt Lake City
Smithfield
Cedar City
We are beyond blessed to have temples dotting the earth.  I love President Nelson's statement, "I pray that we won't miss the majesty of this moment."  (of announcing more temples)  I'm so thankful that I can attend the Houses of the Lord.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Christmas Wishes

Christmas is hard to find in China.  Most external things that signal to us that Christmastime coming is missing here.  We have to look hard to find Christmas trees and decorations.  The typical holiday events and gatherings are missing.  Snow or anticipation of snow is absent.  The music is almost non-existent.  Giving to others is not accepted (it causes extreme embarrassment because they feel like they owe you). This has caused me to look harder and be thankful for the Merry Christmas wishes I do find. I've also had to use my own initiative to fulfil my other Christmas wishes.  Here are some of my Christmas wishes for 2024 found and created: Generally, the government discourages the people from celebrating the 'Western' holiday.  But a few places do find a way to wish me a Merry Christmas! This year we had very vibrant Christmas colors in our complex.  They were stunning, Christmasy and very cheerful!  (pictures taken mid December) Th...

Christmas 2023--A Wonderful Surprise!

Per our contract for living in China, our unmarried children get a free flight to come and visit us.  Chandler is the only one who qualifies for that, but for quite some time, getting a visa to visit wasn't even a possibility.  And when it did become a possibility, it was very expensive and required a 4 day stay in Washington DC or paying a whole lot of money for someone to go into the embassy to do that process for us.  It was not really in consideration.  But when Cache offered to do it for us while he was in DC for Thanksgiving, we decided to go to all of the effort to make it happen.  We decided to keep it a secret from the girls so it would be an amazing Christmas surprise. We did mostly well on the surprise.  Greta did hear me talking to Cache about the visa process one day back in November, but didn't think too much about it or ask further questions so we hoped that she hadn't really heard as I supposed.  I also had up the map of the Seattle air...

Dinner Guests

Before we moved to China, my dream life was to stay home and make dinner for my neighbors.  If asked of a place I'd like to travel, I would usually comment that I would rather have a kitchen remodel than seeing far away places.  That is because I have come to really enjoy having people over for dinner and a kitchen remodel would make that much easier on me--which I cared more about than seeing the world. (It also illustrates my extremely low need for adventure to be happy.) Thankfully I have been able to continue that hobby in China. It is a bit more of a challenge here because of an even smaller kitchen capacity, lack of ingredients and my concern about feeding Chinese people food they might actually like.  For my personal records here are dinners I have photos of. Tina and James (our liaison for our landlady) Sherry, Talia & Stella (Tom's co workers; and Stella tutors me in Chinese) Penny (one of my Chinese teachers) Melissa's cousin (someone from CCID branch asked ...