Our Day at the Newport Beach Temple

Today we spent five hours helping with the tours at the Newport Beach Temple. President Watrous assigned us to take over the duties of the current Elders who have been setting up the tour presentation. The duties include setting up the video called "Between Heaven and Earth," to show the investigators in the chapel of the Stake Center, which is across the street from the temple. We also will be getting the refreshments prepared and set out on a nicely decorated table, to be served to the visitors after they have completed the one-hour tour of the temple grounds. For today, since we are learning, we actually took the tour with a small group of visitors, so we could listen to the tour guide doing the presentation. In the preliminary meeting, I was asked to direct the hymn, and Gary played the piano. There were 70 people in the first tour, broken up into several small groups, and guided by an Elder (ours was Elder Lee from South Korea, who spoke excellent english, and has been a Latter-day Saint all his life. He did a beautiful job.) The second tour was for all Spanish-speaking investigators. I again directed the hymn, and an Elder played the piano. The presentation, including the video, was all in Spanish.

It was a long time on our feet, but the spiritual feeling made the time spent well worth it. The Newport Beach Temple is incredibly beautiful, and the grounds are breath-taking. The story behind the temple is that the people in the area wanted a temple so badly, that they donated all the money for the entire project, including collecting enough extra to buy a 27-rank pipe organ for the Stake Center, along with many very nice paintings.

Anyway, this additional assignment makes for more variety in our mission duties, and the drive to the Temple is beautiful.

On the way home, we decided to go out to dinner, so we drove through the towns until we came to our favorite little city of Orange. It is an old town, with a quaint downtown square and shopping area. We parked in a free public parking place, and walked around until we found a likely restaurant (there were many possibilities; our next will be a mediterranean one). Lucca's is a little Italian eatery, with very good food, better even than we had in Italy! Naturally, for dessert, we both had chocolate gelato! It was a very pleasant end to a very good day.