In a recent episode of the Magnify podcast Melinda Brown, author of Eve and Adam: Discovering the Beautiful Balance, offered three ideas on what it means to honor our temple covenants and better understand our sacred privilege to wear the garment. The ideas are 1) learning through symbols, 2) how much our bodies matter and, 3) we’re meant to be happy right now.
Applying these three ideas to our temple worship can expand our personal understanding of sacred things, bring us closer to Christ, and turn the temple into what Melinda calls, “our happiness project.”
Learning Through Symbols
Melinda found it helpful to look at symbols as we seek to learn more during our temple worship. Symbols provide spiritual connection points to where we’re at on our gospel path.
“The Savior loves to teach with symbols,” Melinda explained. “[Symbols] are rich and vibrant learning tools because they can mean lots of different things, and they can mean different things to you at different stages of your life.”
When we seek to learn through symbols, temple attendance provides opportunities to increase our spiritual knowledge throughout our lives.
How Much Our Bodies Matter
“Bodies are so significant. We have such a strong doctrine of the body,” Melinda says. From the time we are young primary children, we are taught that one of the reasons we came to earth is to get a body.
Participating in ordinances—baptism, taking the sacrament, temple work—requires the use of our bodies. “Think about baptism,” Melinda says. “You actually get in the water and are immersed because there's so much symbolic meaning to immersion. [We] see the symbolism and the [importance of bodies] weaving together there.”
When we’re more conscious of how much our bodies matter, we’re able to better appreciate and learn from them as we do temple work.
We’re Meant to be Happy Now
Temple attendance can transform us and make a significant difference in our lives for the better every time we go. Melinda reminds us that if it isn’t changing us, we need to ask ourselves why we are doing it in the first place. She shares, “So often we talk about eternity in terms of what comes next, but this [life] is a really important part of eternity.”
The temple is our “happiness project.”
Finding Meaning in the Garment
The temple garment pulls together the three fundamental ideas of learning through symbols, how much our bodies matter, and that we’re meant to be happy today. Melinda explains, “The temple garment is symbolic. It’s incredibly tangible. It goes on our body, and we feel it as we wear it. ... Wearing the sacred temple garment is very much a feeling of having the Lord’s arms just wrapped around you—encircled about in the arms of his love.”
Applying these three ideas as we ponder about temple worship can help make us lifelong spiritual learners.
Listen to the full Magnify podcast episode in the player below and on all major streaming platforms.
▶ You may also like: A realization about the word ‘endowment’ to bring more peace to your temple worship
