Draper Temple Open House

© 2008, David C. Moore. All rights reserved.

We went to the Draper Temple Open House yesterday. I couldn't believe all of the people! (although it was a Saturday). We went to a church building in Draper first and sat in the gym, then in the RS room to watch a movie and then to the 'staging area' to wait for the buses. I don't think the staging area is part of it, normally, but a couple of the buses had an accident so they were running a little behind. As I played I spy with the boys, and watched other parents try to pacify their children, I couldn't help but wonder if this is what it will be like when we're all in the hereafter waiting for our 'kingdom assignments'.

Once we made it to the Temple, the boys were so excited, but surprisingly reverent. They looked through the brochures we were handed and chose which rooms would be their favorites before they even entered the temple. The first area we saw was the baptistry and they were all blown away. We've always told the boys that they would be able to go to the temple when they turned 19, to prepare for their missions. When I mentioned to Jake that he could do baptisms in the temple when he turned 12, he couldn't stop grinning. "So, every time you and dad go to the temple, I can go to and do baptisms?" Yep. I literally had to drag him away from the glass surrounding the font.

I asked everyone what their favorite parts were once we left the temple.
Jake - looking in the mirrors in one of the sealing rooms (Cam later commented that 'those mirrors were insane!')
Cam - the Celestial Room, because of the chandelier
Josh - seeing the rainbows that were made by the crystals on the chandeliers - he was looking forward to these because of his cousin's Temple Review the previous day
Sam - he really like the mirrors, too
Abby (my sister) - the cookies afterwards (her words) and I think she liked the Bride's Waiting Room. We wanted to try it out, ya know, waiting there to be a bride, but there were a lot of people behind us and we didn't wait to hold up traffic
Me - I really liked the murals painted on the walls, it added so much life to the rooms
Jared - the really high ceilings in the Celestial Room - he's guessing they were about 60 ft based on his calculations of the door height and then stacking it on top of itself ( what an engineer!)

The tour guide on our bus said we could come back as many times as we wanted between now and March. I'd really like to go again. If you're thinking about going and are worried about tickets, there are plenty. When I went online on Friday to look for ours, they still had tickets available every day from now until mid-March. It was a great opportunity to take our boys and share the experience with them.