When you work in the temple most of the time, you do many of the same things repeatedly. You'd think there's not much to tell about in that case. I seek to find words to convey the delight we have in the temple.
Yesterday, we were responsible to make the schedule for the roughly 30 people who came to serve in the morning as ordinance workers at the Nauvoo temple. Some are full-time missionaries, like us. Some come every Saturday morning, but live in the area. Some come once or twice a month. On Saturday mornings, we regularly have a few people who come to temple to make their own eternal covenants with God. Since we were assigning the workers' schedules for yesterday, we assigned a guide for each of these individuals. A guide welcomes them and sticks with them through the 1 to 4 hour process of making these eternal commitments. As Mimi and I looked at the list of workers and the list of (let's call them) newcomers, we needed to match worker guides with each newcomer. Well, one newcomer couple was married with little children. The adults come to the temple a few hours before their children. The mom (who had never been in a temple before) was anxious that her little ones, particularly the one-year-old, would be cared for adequately when they arrived.
In assigning guides, we asked a couple who drives in from a couple of hours away in Iowa once a month to be their guides. We'd never asked these folks to serve in this way before. It just so happened that the woman who was guiding was able to be very reassuring to the mom that all would be well with her children, because she would personally see to it. It seems that when she had come to the temple for the first time years before, she too had little children, including a nursing baby. She felt all the same anxieties, and had seen that her children were provided a very sweet experience. She could allay yesterday's newcoming mom's distress and tell at the end of the day what a choice experience both the newcomers and the only occasional guides had shared together.
Well, of course, there is no way we could have known that these were the right folks to match up together. There is no coincidence!
