Furnishing Our Lives With Eternal Joy

I spent a few hours this morning shampooing  carpets in sealing rooms of the KC temple.

I’ve been in those rooms many, many times. For about a year straight, I served by proxy in a sealing room most every Friday. I still attend the temple weekly, but now I alternate the ordinances I perform.

In the sealing room, I’ve witnessed various family compositions that make up a sealing ordinance: ten siblings sealed to their parents at one time, a grown woman sealed to her deceased parents, small children brought in to be sealed to their parents for time and all eternity who were civilly married years before, an older widow-widower couple sealed to each other for time only, and much more.

Those rooms have been filled with friends and family and strangers. Sometimes the seating space on sealing room chairs have been shared to fit everyone in the room. Other times, many empty chairs have reflected the intimacy of the moment.

Temple sealers have stood next to the altar or have sat behind the small desk provided for them, opening and closing its drawer to retrieve a pencil, a sheet of names, a ceremony script.

I’ve seen accommodations too.

The altar kneeling pads have been removed for wheelchair accessibility or a regular chair has replaced it for those with feeble knees.

As I walked into the sealing room today, it was barren. There was nothing on the floor except the carpet to be cleaned. No furniture. No altar. Not even the chandeliers were lit upon entry.

As I tried to imagine from memory where all the chairs go once the cleaning was done, I thought about when I decluttered my bedroom and how I took everything out first (except my bed). After vacuuming the floor, I intentionally placed only those things that I wanted back in the room. The “feng shui feeling” of having the right things in the room was empowering.

I felt joy.

(It’s about time for another session 😅).

All this made me realize that we have to co-create our experience into the eternities.

At the beginning of a potentially Celestial (eternal) relationship is a clear slate, like an empty sealing room. Heavenly Father created that space for us but we must fill it with good and pure things, the right things, including ourselves.

Satan does not want that room filled. He will stop at nothing to make us feel like we don’t belong there and that the people who come in, especially the one who will kneel across the altar from us, are not right for us in some way.

To the newly engaged couple who was blessed by this experience and inspired me to post it, as well as those (Latter-Day Saint or not) who need to hear this message, you are not alone in the struggle to push past the opposition against co-creating your eternal family.

Not every union is right, but if you know it is, fight for it! I have no doubt that it will be worth all that God has in store if you press forward in faith.

#familiesareforever

#oppositionisinallthings

#pressforward