Taylorsville Utah Temple

Church President Russell Nelson announced the construction of 17 new temples, from Montana to Texas, the Congo to Spain, New Zealand to Peru, bringing the total number of temples to 282 worldwide. I drive past two temples under construction every morning and afternoon, one near my home—the Taylorsville Temple—and one near my work an hour away—the Deseret Peak Temple.  While I could drive an alternate way, I feel drawn to the temple route, where twice a day I get to see the construction progress.  Through the winter, the crews completed the steel framing of the Taylorsville temple, and dressed the ribbed walls with foam-panel insulation.  Behind scaffolding, marble and granite slabs began to clad the ground floor, and just today enormous cranes lowered the steel-gray steeple.  In Tooele, the Deseret Peak temple shows only the steel-beam super-structure forming the ground floor, mid-section, and tower, the walls yet to be built.  These temples are sacred edifices to the Latter-day Saints, Houses of God.  There Church members learn about the purpose of life on earth and the possibility of eternal life with an omni-beneficent Father.  There we make covenants to be determined disciples of Jesus: chaste, sacrificing, kind, generous, and honest disciples.  And there we are “sealed” or joined to our families in eternal unbreakable familial links and bonds.  I look forward to seeing what the crews accomplish each day, and I rejoice in the progress toward the ultimate stunning exalting beauty of the final buildings.  I wondered aloud to my siblings about this fascination of mine, and realized that the slow incremental transition from the foundation cornerstone to the steeple capstone gives me hope, hope in the life process of slow and careful creation toward a perfect end.  Like the temples, I hope my character is being similarly dressed and shaped and polished.  I know this: as I age, every act of meanness and gossip and pride and stinginess brings me pain, and every instance of kindness and compassion and generosity and forgiveness brings me pleasure.  So it is that I joy in driving by these two temples, twice a day, knowing they will be finished and perfect, in time, and hoping the same for me.

Deseret Peak Temple in Tooele, Utah

(Photos from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  Used under the Fair Use Doctrine.)