¿Questions?

Do you have to wait until you are baptized to give your testimony?  Not that I'm going to do it any time soon-ish.  Just wondering.


I keep reading about Temples.  It seems to me that LDS folks feel strongly about temples.  I am excited to go one day but I do not think I feel in the way that other Mormons feel.  Mormons seem to feel about the Temple the way I would feel about going to the real Hogwarts Castle.  The Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist, and whatever other churches I've visited before in my life did not feel special and were not treated like I thought you should treat a holy place of worship.  I mean, everyone knows it's a place of worship but there's still this gap between it's specialness and holiness.  Or at least that was my observation.  When I was 17 I went to Italy for two weeks.  The things I was most stoked about were seeing the architecture, the food, and the Sistine Chapel/the Vatican.  The architecture was so old, the food was so...omgosh I gained twenty lbs., and the Sistine Chapel...well I don't know why but I thought I was going to have some sort of spiritual event upon visiting.  The architecture was just as amazing and more so than I expected.  The food...well I gained twenty lbs.  And the Sistine Chapel and the Vatican?  I got the darkest feeling when I went inside the Vatican.  There was this beautiful artwork in the Chapel...but the feeling had been stomped out of it.  Or maybe touristed out of it.  It was strange and empty.  There was no reason, no influence that would have prompted me to feel the way I felt upon entrance to the other buildings but it just felt negative.  Made me think of liars, and deceit, and conspiracy, and betrayal, and the death of all the Church's good intentions.  I mean the Catacombs were down right creepy and not because they were Catacombs.  I won't go into any more detail (unless you ask me privately) but the feeling was dark, dude.  So I was super disappointed.  And in every basilica, I experienced a similar emptiness...a lack of holiness.  So I'm worried about the Temple.  I expect that we humanized those other magnificent artifacts and that's why I got disappointed.  The HG may have hung around in there a bit but the HG didn't live there.  I am expecting the HG to hang out in the Temple like it's his own crib.  I'm expecting it not to look or feel like something you take a tour of and snap some pix for your FB profile.  I'm expecting magnificence and tranquility and opportunity.  But please, help me out on that.  I don't want my expectations to wreck my experience one day.

PS - I did not completely discount that outing, though.  I ended up dancing in the middle of a cobblestone street with five monks while eating coffee flavored ice cream cones.  Somewhere out there is a picture of this wonderfully happy phenomenon and I will forever hold a special place in my heart for those simple men who felt compelled to serve the Lord.  You could see it on their faces and hear it in their voices no matter what language was being spoken.  That's what I had gone to find in the first place.  They treated me like their Sister.