Temple aches & pains

Tuesday night my mom, dad and I worked our one and only shift of ushering at the temple open house. We got there at 4:45 pm to get brief instructions and then were taken up to the temple to replace the previous shift. I was supposed to usher at the stake center (just west of the temple) where the tour starts and ends with refreshments. I ended up being sent to the temple due to lack of numbers, which was totally cool with me. I was definitely ok with standing in the temple versus overseeing and cleaning up refreshments. There were about 150 people involved with that shift - either ushering at the temple, ushering at the stake center, or shoveling snow outside.

For the first two hours I was located in the doorway just up the first flight of stairs leading into the first floor. I saw plenty of people I knew, and I tried to sit down as much as possible when no tours were around. After those first two hours, the location of ushers on my floor were changed to give us a change of scenery. I was moved to the middle of the first floor just inside the lobby/recommend desk. I then heard the tour dialogue about the recommends & changing into white clothes over and over and over. I think I'll forever remember that the white clothes symbolize purity and equality - not that I didn't know it before! This location didn't give me much time to sit down due to where I was at and also due to the fact that it got crazy busy. It was totally youth group night. My back and feet started hurting around 8:30 pm, so I was ready to be done with the supposed last tour at 9:10pm. The funny thing is that they won't turn people away, so we kept going until no one was left.....10pm. I had the hardest time smiling at the last few groups. The experience was definitely a good one and I'm glad I got the opportunity to participate in the open house.

One comical thing about the night was that my brother, Clayton, got to celebrate his good news of the day (being invited to big league spring training, which is huge and totally unexpected) by babysitting Audrey and Jaden. Snerk.