A few years ago I attended a fireside for my Relief Society. The speaker was Elder Koelliker from one of the quorums of the Seventy. I don't remember which and I think he was newly called at the time, but he had also served or was still serving on the Temple Committee of the church. So he spoke about temples. Not just that, but raising your children to love and look to the temple. That evening was extremely influential on my ideas and ideology about parenting. I could write a sermon about it. But I'll spare you and just say that our activities Saturday were largely a product of Elder Koelliker's fireside. I came home that night a few years ago with a short list of things we could do to be better parents which really had never occurred to me. One of them was to physically take our children to the temple fairly regularly so that they could walk around the grounds and feel what is to be felt there.
And so we did that Saturday.
Upon arriving, (a bit more than an hour's drive,) we discovered that we weren't totally prepared to walk around the temple grounds. It slipped our minds to wear appropriate clothes. Feeling too casual in dress, we decided to stop in the parking lot and show our boys the temple from there. Nolan was excited to see it anyway. He talks about temples all the time and points out any tower/spire (on the playground, clock towers, churches, you name it) and calls it a temple. It was good to be able to clear things up for him a little bit. Unfortunately, we didn't get very close to the temple, but there's always next time. Luckily, the Sacred Grove and Joseph Smith Homes are right down the road, so we walked to them and went into Palmyra for a while. Next time we'll be better prepared to feel like we can walk around the grounds of the temple and show our reverence for a place that we hold most sacred.
P.S. I'm sorry if that's not how Koelliker is really spelled.
