Sisters

During our temple visits, Kevin and I do a lot of sealings. With the headaches being as unpredictable as they have been, the sealing sessions have been a good fit for us over the last little while. It is a shorter session so if I’m headachy, I can get back home a bit sooner. And while reservations for endowment sessions can be very hard to make unless you are doing so months in advance, we can almost always find a sealing session at a convenient time within the next week or less. Which means that if I’m having a hard headache day or week, we can easily reschedule. And honestly, every time we walk in and ask to do temple names instead of family names, the temple workers get excited. There are so many people who are waiting for sealing ordinances, whose names have been printed or waiting in the queue for a long time. It is wonderful that there are so many people taking family names to the temple, but it can also be really neat to do temple names. I’ve had some really amazing experiences performing ordinances for strangers.

For many years, Kevin and I did mainly endowment sessions with occasional trips to do other ordinances. I think a lot of people do the same. But I have really loved participating in so many sealing sessions. It is an opportunity to listen to the words of the ordinance time and time again, which has given me a chance to really learn them, to ponder on the covenants I’m making, and to find joy in the promised blessings. And while it doesn’t happen in every session, there are times when the sealer running the session will impart some knowledge they have learned over the years or invite us to think about one particular part of the ordinance. For example, today our sealer talked about the fact that in the sealing ordinance we “receive” our spouse as opposed to the commonly phrased “take” your spouse that is used in many other religious or even civil marriages. Think about that. There is a world of difference between those two words. 

We have also learned about several differences in the way sealings can be done. First of all, you don’t have to kneel if there is a physical reason you can’t. Those nice cushions that surround the altar can be lifted out so that a chair or wheelchair can be placed right beside the altar. Makes sense, right? Another thing we have learned that I suspect many people don’t know is that if there are multiple siblings that need to be sealed to their parents, the ordinance can be done once to seal all of them instead of doing a separate sealing for each sibling. The ordinance is valid either way, but it can be kind of neat to have an entire “family” gathered around the altar at the same time.

I have been able to stand as proxy in such a sealing several times over the years, and today I had another chance to participate in this less common type of sealing. Kevin and I were proxy as the married couple as two sisters were sealed to their parents. And as I knelt at the altar, the Spirit reminded me in a powerful way that because I am sealed to my parents, I am also bound to my sisters with the same eternal, unbreakable bond. Everything that has happened with Esther in the past month has been a harsh reminder of the fleeting nature of mortality. And this morning the reminder of the eternal nature of my family was a blessing. We are sisters. Always have been. Always will be. And that is a joyful thought.