When the temple worker holding my hand opened the door, I saw Mom. She was kneeling next to a white altar, holding hands with Dad. Their smiles grew bigger when my siblings and I joined them. The room was filled with people, and I sensed so much love that I figured this must be a wedding. I looked at the bottom of Mom’s white dress expecting to see a long, flowing train like the brides on TV wore. Hers had none. I worried she was underdressed.
“Are you sure this isn’t a wedding?” I whispered loudly to her. She laughed as did others close enough to overhear. “It’s called a ‘sealing,’ remember?” Mom whispered back.
Even at eight years old, I knew the temple wasn’t like our Sunday meeting chapels. I felt a sensation of peace and love like an energy in the air. Everything felt so powerful and secure.
My two younger siblings and I gathered around the altar with our parents, and a man in authority started talking to us. At one point, the door of the sealing room opened and revealed the hallway lined with excited temple workers dressed in white. People both without and within the room were emotional. And why did they all come to see us?
Because it was the summer of 1979, and ours was the first live sealing of a Black family in the Oakland California Temple.1
Our sealing wasn’t impacting just our family. For some who witnessed the sacred event (whether in the room or nearby in the hallway), it was a healing experience as well. They’d been waiting and looking forward to this change, too. Peace and healing began settling over the Church throughout the world and individually in the hearts of people of all colors.
For more than 40 years, I’ve continued to experience both sealings and healing, in every aspect of the word, through the temple. Here are two examples.
Physical Healing
At the end of my full-time mission, I was in a serious car accident and had a traumatic head injury. I suffered headaches, memory problems, and anxiety. I also had terrible pain in my neck.
About five months after the accident, I tried to return to my studies at Brigham Young University while rehabilitating. Overwhelmed, I dropped out of all but one class. One discouraging day, I was overcome by an urge to go to the temple, but there was no way my neck could endure an entire endowment session.
But my longing for peace in the temple pulled at me again. I decided to try an initiatory ordinance.
My neck ached as I walked into the Provo temple. I made my way to the appropriate desk and asked if I could serve, but not for long because I had a head injury. “Do you think you could do just two initiatories?” the temple worker asked. I agreed.
When I went in for the first name, something happened. My mind fixated on the words of the blessing pronouncement, and my neck began to feel stronger. I eagerly went for the second name and felt awash with emotional comfort.
After that, I left the temple humbled, relieved, and stunned. I still had a headache, but I felt like my neck was strong enough to hold up my head again. My neck never returned to the amount of pain and weakness I had when I entered the temple that day. The Lord called me to His Holy House to be healed, physically! That degree of healing gave me the ability to confidently persevere through the rest of my rehabilitation and earn my degree.
Spiritual Healing
Early in my marriage, I was the main breadwinner. I owned my own business in sales and supported my husband, then a full-time student, and our two small sons. It was hard to navigate all my responsibilities while also participating in extended family events.
One day, for some reason, I felt disgruntled. I felt like my mother-in-law didn’t approve of my business nor appreciate my exhausting efforts to support her son and grandchildren. But the truth was she never spoke unkindly to me and was never rude. I knew my negative thoughts were probably the adversary’s attempt to distract me and stir me up.
In prayer, I tried to forgive whatever imagined-up offense I’d bought into. I wanted to rid myself of this negative undercurrent humming inside me. But I couldn’t seem to shake it off.
The next week, we were invited to join my husband’s family in the temple to do some of their family’s sealings. During our session sitting together, my heart completely changed. I found myself feeling adoration and deep gratitude toward my mother-in-law. When we walked out of the building, I knew it had happened again—I was healed, spiritually and emotionally. These loving feelings have only increased since then.
A Life of Healing
I see the brilliance of God when He invites us to return to the temple and serve others through vicarious ordinances, even as Jesus Christ’s Atonement vicariously saves us. I get to re-experience that treasured childhood moment in 1979 and recommit myself to God and thereby, my family.
In the unique, still, consecrated environment of cleanliness and peace of the temple, there is more happening to us and through us than meets the natural eye—I am certain. I like to visualize entering the building and having invisible spiritual matter envelops my spirit slowly like honey, pouring over me and filling the grooves or chinks that the blows of life have compromised. The longer I am in there, the more I am healed and sealed when I exit.
Do not underestimate the stunningly generous, perpetual invitation the Lord, Jesus Christ, extends to us. When we come to the temple, we come unto Him again and again—and we are sealed and healed.
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Article note:
1. As an adult, I wondered how that could be true, as the revelation allowing all worthy Black men to hold and officiate in the priesthood was given one year before in June of 1978 the month my parents were baptized. Through research and conversations with other ‘early’ Black members of the Church, I learned that while there were Black members before 1978, some of them were so frustrated with the limitations and challenges of waiting for an indeterminate amount of time for policy change that they were not actively participating in the Church that year and needed some time to decide to return and obtain a temple recommend.