Sorry- no pictures for this post

     I think nearly everybody has eaten in a restaurant. But not that many have experienced working in one. Or if they did, it was only for as short a time as they could suffer through. We have all read books, newspapers, and magazines. Very few of us have done the work to produce one.
     Today as I watched workers scurry around the temple and overheard planning discussions, I realized how few people who enter temples understand how much effort it takes to make their experience as pleasant as possible. I know I never did despite having gone to lots of temples lots of times. In the temporal world- restaurants, cruise ships, magazines, tv shows- the effort to make things pleasant is for profit. People will only return for your service if it's beneficial to their lives. (You can see the opposite in a communist society where workers are paid no matter how hard they work- same with guaranteed jobs like civil service protected ones where you can't be fired.) In the temple, all the people getting up early, struggling to do things right, scurrying around quietly, etc. are all doing it for love- love of God and their brothers and sisters. None of them are perfect but perfection is their goal. They're on the path headed in that direction. They care about how "good" they are, not about how they perform compared to others or what reward they're going to get. They care that when they come face to face with their Lord, they can hold their heads up and smile knowing He will welcome them with open arms and they know they did their best.
     There is so much to learn in the process of making things pleasant for others. Each temple is structurally unique so procedures are a little different even though the ordinances are the same worldwide. There are lots of stairs in the Nauvoo temple but some temples are only one level or primarily use elevators. (We have 2 but they don't get used by everybody because they're so "reverent"-slow and quiet- that it's faster to use the stairs!) Because of the various aspects of the rooms, we may have to go up and down and around quite a bit to get where we need to go when we're changing stations or running errands. This is what takes so long to learn! At first, I felt inadequate because most of the workers here have worked in other temples. Once I opened up and got to know more people, I'm finding out most of them have moments of feeling overwhelmed, too, because this temple isn't like whatever temple(s) they have worked in before. No matter what problems there are, no matter how tired we feel, the major goal is to be loving and patient. That's how God is.