#27 Vernal Utah Temple

August 27, 2021

We made a quick weekend trip to Vernal to a balloon festival, Dinosaur Monument & Temple Trip.  Enoch & Jonah stayed home, so it was just Ammon & I at the temple.  We had the entire appointment to ourselves.  The workers were so kind and helpful and let us do 20 baptisms each!  The temple is a smaller temple, so they had some things they did that were extra nice touches!  First, we had to remove our shoes and socks and put on clean socks just to walk around the baptistry.   It really just gave the message that this was a special sacred place.  They had a baptizer ready to go for us, which is rare.  It just felt like they were ready to take care of us.  They had bath mats in the changing stalls and hangers in the lockers.  Just little touches that seem like they are trying to make it special.  Something unique in this font is the huge mirror on the other side of the font.  It was cool to see the baptism from all angles.  Also I noticed the oxen had green grass and wheat all around the base.  Wheat was all through the temple and I'm guessing it was symbolizing the staff of life.

August 28, 2021

This morning I was able to go on my own to do an endowment, sealing & initiatories. The temple is smaller, and feel like an older house with lots of staircases.  I found out that it used to be a tabernacle and was converted to a temple.  You can see a lot of the furniture looks like it is restored antiques.  I did an endowment first.  The wals of the telestial room were all painted.  I didn't notice, but apparently each section represents part of Christ's life.  The temple is beautiful, but has an old feeling to it.  I assume they wanted to keep some of the feeling of the old tabernacle, which a local told me was really special to them.

The sealing room took my breath away.  No because of the beauty of the decor, because that was more simple, but when you first walk in there is a huge painting of Christ with open arms surrounded by angels announcing his coming.  It's probably 20 feet tall, and it is breath taking anf feel like you are walking right to the Savior.  The Spirit was so strong I was overcome with emotion and tears.

After spending time in the sealing room, I went to to sealings.  There were only 2 other sisters there, and they had to get some temple workers to help us out.  We had to wait quite awhile, but I was still able to do 9 sealings.  The sealing rooms also had wheat painted on the walls.

Last I did initiatories. I was a little bummed that they started 10 minutes late and wouldn't let me go over and so I only got to do 4 names.  But it was an amazing g experience nonetheless.