Say More: At Last She Writes It

No. 14 | April 2024

photo by Blakelee Ellis

What Renovating Temples has Taught Me About Grace

by Kayelynn Guthman

It's 7am on a freezing January morning,

and my husband and I pull up to work. The security guard has already unlocked the front gate to the construction site, so we head to our onsite office. After some daily paperwork and a check in with the site Superintendent, we enter the building we're renovating. It's a normal day, but the building is anything but normal. It's a temple. The company my husband and I work for has worked on many temple renovations over the years, and my husband has done several of those. But it's only the second temple I've worked on and the first large scale interior renovation I've been a part of.

It's been a steep learning curve starting this job for a myriad of reasons, and an overwhelming experience to work on the House of the Lord, a place many people see as the closest thing to perfection as exists on this earth. But let me tell you something: It is not perfect.

Over the last several months, we've run into problems that come up in many renovations—mold, rust, water damage, cracked tiles, failing pipes, poor craftsmanship, poor quality … the list goes on. Many of these things are not visible to the patrons enjoying the temple on a daily basis. They're encased in thirty year old walls dressed in beautiful wallpaper, unseen until you peel back the façade.

There are so many metaphors you can make with this, and honestly, it was a bit shocking to me—someone who had little to no experience with construction before—that the temple had such poor craftsmanship. But it's been a humbling few months as we've tried to leave the temple better than we found it. We've run into problems and limits that cannot be overcome. And it finally occurred to me a few weeks ago why it has hit me so hard and so profoundly.

Grace.

Our temples are not perfect buildings, because no earthly building is. Everyone who works on a building is limited by a million things—materials, colors, methods, time, etc. They're limited by human beings' inability to make perfect things. We can get close. We can make a corner as close to ninety degrees as possible. We can painstakingly apply paint so that it doesn't have streaks. We can lay tile just so. But at the end of the day, this building is made by human hands, with human error baked into the very studs that hold it up.

And yet.