As many of you probably know, the Atlanta temple is reopening after 22 months of renovations - inside and out. It is absolutely gorgeous!
The open house begins April 9 and will continue until April 23. The youth from the entire Atlanta, Georgia temple area (that includes 3 states!) will participate in a cultural celebration, which they have been diligently working on (and I will be diligently sewing costumes for) on April 30th. The temple will be rededicated Sunday, May 1, and on Tuesday, May 3, we will be welcoming members from the entire southeast back into the temple. And by we, I literally mean we - Brad and Courtney Andersen. On day 31 - the last day of this blog challenge - we met with the temple president, and he asked us to be ordinance workers. I'm assuming everyone reading this blog knows what I'm talking about, if not - ask me and I will gladly tell you! We're excited and look forward to learning lots more about everything that goes on in those sacred temple walls. I, honestly, have only been through a handful of times myself and am beyond scared. I have no idea what I'll be doing and how I'm going to be able to do it. People are going to ask me questions that I won't know the answers to, and I'll have to learn that that's ok. I've always thought of ordinance workers as old retired mission presidents who are Book of Mormon scholars and know everything there is to know about the church. I'm 22, and my knowledge base of anything scripturally is from the few BYU religions classes I was required to take to graduate. Needless to say, however, this will be a great blessing for us. We won't be able to do this again until our future children are grown and out of the house. I'm looking forward to learning from the wiser members who will also be working with us. And I'm, of course, especially grateful for the opportunity we have to learn the temple ordinances better.
What a great ending to this blog challenge. 31 days. A blog post every day (or a couple days later ...). But I wrote about things that I would have never written about normally. Many days I simply took a picture just to take a picture and write about it. Luckily Killer was around for most of the month. She was my go to picture. But because of this challenge, I will always and forever remember things I once I was deemed unimportant, but may very well be meaningful in years to come. While I won't write a post everyday, I do hope to utilize this blog more (especially since I'll be paying $5 every year for it) to capture memories of every day life.
