Pres. Henry B. Eyring (Apr. '21): "I Love to See the Temple"

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 I designed this activity as one way to hopefully achieve Pres. Eyring's purpose in this talk (par. 12:  "My purpose today . . . coming for us.").  I hope that this activity will motivate us by helping us to focus on some of the blessing that Pres. Eyring identifies as coming from the temple and temple worship.  

The Activity:

  1. Divide the class into three groups.
  2. Explain that Pres. Eyring mentions at least three blessings we can receive from attending the temple.  Each group will receive a quote from the talk that highlights one of these blessings.  Pass out a slip of paper to each group.  Each slip of paper should have one of the following quotes on it:
    1. Par. 5:  "The temple is . . . worthy of it."
    2. Par. 19:  "When we are . . . throughout our lives."
    3. Par. 25-29:  "I have seen . . . and lift us."  Perhaps you might want to give only par. 29:  "That is what . . . and lift us."
  3. Ask the groups to read aloud each passage and then discuss.  They may want to address questions such as the following:
    1. When have you seen or heard of this blessing being realized?
    2. Why do you think the temple fosters this particular blessing?
    3. What are some ways a person can more consciously seek this blessings?
    4. How might this blessing help us and our families in the last days?
  4. After 7 or 8 minutes (or whatever amount of time seems appropriate), bring the class back together and ask each group to share some of what they talked about.  As they do, look for connections between the points the groups discuss.

Using the Activity:

As I said in the introduction, this activity was designed to help us dig into some of the items in Pres. Eyring's talk in order for us to increase our motivation to attend the temple.  Pedagogically speaking, this lesson is also designed to increase participation.  Not only do smaller groups foster greater comfort among people to talk but also by providing topics/questions this lesson also helps to prompt more in depth conversations.  A further benefit of this structure is that it increases the time class members spend on a single idea (multi-faceted idea, but still a single idea).  This focused time makes it possible for greater insight to come out.

I pray that this activity idea will help you either by being useful as it is or by helping you to come up with an even better idea of your own.  Please let me know how it goes.

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