The temple - boredom

The discomfort I felt my first time through the temple didn't deter me from going again, instead it spurred me on. I knew the temple was holy and that I needed to get comfortable with the ways of the Lord. 

I expected the temple ordinances to slowly come into focus for me, but by about the third or fourth session I started falling asleep. The endowment, as it turns out, is simply boring. You do the same things every time and watch the same shitty movie (yes, there are/were a couple different versions) and it takes an hour and a half minimum. What shitty full length film would you like to sit through over and over? How badly do you want to go play Pat-a-cake with total strangers over and over. Go to the temple enough and it starts to feel like the movie Groundhog Day with Bill Murray. 

A couple months into weekly attendance it was a miracle if I could keep awake through an entire session. I did get more comfortable with the clothing, hand gestures, bowing my head and saying yes to covenants, whispering formulas through a curtain, all of that. Maybe even too comfortable. It also became easier and easier to be critical and/or suspicious of the whole thing. 

But I still believed it wholeheartedly for years afterward. I told myself to focus more on the content, not the format. Something marvelous was right before my eyes, I just had to learn to see it.