Easy peasy lemon squeezy...hardly!

Yesterday our family headed south about an hour to attend the new Payson temple open house. For my non LDS friends, a temple is a sacred place to us where we worship, learn about God's plan for us as his children and make covenants with God. Normally you have to be a member of our church in good standing and have a temple recommend to enter but anyone can attend during the open house, which happens for a few weeks before the dedication. That means our children could go in and see this beautiful, peaceful place. They can go to the temple at 12 to certain places in the temple, but they have to be much older to see all of it. 

This photo looks pretty picture perfect right? Let me share some of the things that happened leading up to this. My husband and I bickered on and off all day, several of my children did NOT want to make the drive and wanted to stay home, there was major fighting in the car, horrible traffic on the freeway so we got off to go another way and that was was worse, we got lost, my 16 year old was driving so that made it more stressful, several children didn't like the picnic I packed for dinner, we didn't have tickets and went standby so the wait to get into the temple was an hour, the kids were restless. I could go on but you get the idea. Needless to say it was crazy! 

Honestly it would have been easier to stay home or turn around once we hit the traffic and go home, put on pajamas and watch a movie. But then we would have missed out on this picture filled with light, we would have missed out on the smiles I saw on my kids faces in the temple. We would have missed out on the memories created and the lesson that the temple is important to us and that even when it's inconvenient and hard we still go. One of my friends pointed out the contrast of dark and light in this photo and we certainly had the contrasts as we made our journey. 

Doing the things that really matter isn't easy, often it's inconvenient and messy and really difficult. Raising a family isn't supposed to be easy, it's a learning and refining experience. Once we learn to accept that it changes our perspective. 

All of my kids agreed at the end of the night that it was worth it and they loved going.  And Dave and I kissed and made up...