Temple trips and rose gardens

This past week I had the extraordinary opportunity to participate in  my ward's temple night. I had never been to the St. George temple, and I was very interested considering how much history is involved with the temple. We all loaded up in our little car pool, and for the simple reason of amazing car companions, the forty five minute road trip went by ridiculously fast. Walking into the temple, it felt like a dropped a heavy backpack off my back. It was the most amazing sense of relief I have felt in a while. The whole process was very intriguing, as it was different in some ways versus my experiences in the Provo temple. It was small and intimate, whereas the Provo temple is always crowed and sometimes feels too full of people. The architecture of the building was phenomenal, and it just reaffirmed my testimony of the church. If the struggling, poverty-stricken saints in early St. George history could build such a magnificent building with such detail with very little resources, they must have believed that this temple was vital to their salvation. It was beautiful.

Because I was only the third one in the group of like twenty five to go through the process, I was left with time on my hands and I decided to explore the grounds of the temple. As soon as I walked out of the doors, my eyes were drawn to a small sitting area in the corner of the field that was lit up. As I ventured closer, I discovered a rose garden surrounding the seating area, obviously intended for photographic purposes. As I leaned to smell one of the beautifully bloomed pink roses, I was suddenly hit with the strongest memory of my mom trimming our rosebushes at home on hot Saturdays. As she had guys around to do the mowing, she usually attended to the vast number of rose bushes on our property, and in my mind I went over the countless times she would cut flowers to put on our kitchen counter. It was one of the most heart-wrenching experiences as I sat on that cold bench remembering my mom doing something she enjoyed doing. That day I was grateful for my mom's ability to see beauty in the smallest things.