The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints now has 142 dedicated temples and it will be 170 when all of the anounced temples are completed. Wow! When I was a kid, I memorized all of the temples and where they were located, but I think that is impossible today, at least for me.
I remember once when I lived in North Carolina I encountered a woman who had strong feeling about a Temple being built there. She first told me it was so big and seemed surprised when I said it was small for one of our temples. She responded by talking about how gaudy and pretentious it was. I explained that we were not trying to be pretentious. It is just we believe that the temple she saw is literally the House of the Lord and, as such, when we built it, we used the best we had, including architectural design and materials. She seemed a bit taken aback. I asked if she thought we shouldn't give our best when we build a sacred house to the Lord. She said that we should. I haven't seen her or talked to her since that day, but the temple being constructed gave us an opening to talk. I hope it was constructive. We talk about all the benefits of the temple and there are many, but just the fact of people in the area seeing the temple go up can be a good thing that I don't think we necessarily talk about enough.
Is there anything about this talk that impacted you? What talk would you like me to go over next week? Leave me comments and let me know what you think.