THE AMAZING LEGO TEMPLE!
Okay, so the stake presidency decided in February of 2008 to have a big ol' Stake Temple Day and really hype it up. It was to take place in November and the stake president requested that each auxillary come up with an idea on how to promote it. The first idea I had was not going to work as it involved attaching things to the ceiling and walls of the primary room, which, apparently, the church building people frown upon...who knew. So, my 2nd counselor brought up the idea that she had used where each kid built a temple out of sugar cubes. I loved the idea, but thought that (1) that's gonna be A LOT of sugar cubes and (2) it needed to be GINORMOUS in scale. So I asked my brother, Nate, who goes by LegoNater in some circles, to create a Mesa Temple out of Legos. He honed it over a couple of months and finally we had it! He built it using the Lego Creator program on Lego.com. Once you're done with your model you can upload it to the website and order the kit, complete with instructions and an official Lego box with a picture of the finished project on it. COOOOOOOOL. We ordered one for each ward. Through some divine intervention the Lego people messed up the order (lost it, then found it) and let us have 2 full orders for the price of one. This proved fortuitous because we divided wards and added one ward and needed a second temple kit for two others due to primary size. Whew. Yes, Heavenly Father does take care of things even when you don't know they need to be taken care of.
So once we got the temples I wrote a sharing time called "Building our Testimonies of The Temple." (Clever, eh?) The lesson went over the blessings we receive by attending the temple and asked the kids to name additional blessings. These blessing were then written on the inside of each lego brick or placed on paper and put in the center of the temple which was hollow. Then the kids put the temple together brick by brick while listing the blessings. Then the kids were told to ask their parents to take them to the temple visitors' center on Stake Temple Day. I got to see a couple of the sharing times and the primary presidencies did amazing jobs and made the sharing time way better.
Each ward only got the bricks for the temple, window and door stickers (created on my little ol' computer with PrintMaster and printed out on address labels for easy attachment) and a 10"square green baseplate. The primary presidency then were instructed to decorate the temple however they wanted and then present it to the bishop and have him put it in his office. The stake president asked if we could bump up the schedule for this a week so that the bishop could then show the congregation during sacrament meeting the Sunday before the Stake Temple Day. It was so cool. I put together one using an extra set for the stake president's office. No reason for him to be left out. Here are the pictures. I found the bride and groom, camera man and plants on ebay and at the Lego store in Chandler. I cut the palm fronds out of fun foam. The other temples were great too. Each one different and cool. It was a truly inspired thing and the kids totally loved it.
I send a shout out to by brother, Nate, for his dedication and lego skills. He was just as enthusiastic as I was. And now we may be branching out. In fact, we've been asked, "Where do I get one of those?" so many times that we are seriously looking into creating a couple kits and hawking them on ebay. We think a series of other temples and Book of Mormon events are total possibilities. Lego Liahona anyone?
