Rather than find 65 men and 70 women who would be willing to spend every Saturday afternoon working at the Idaho Falls Temple, each of the other shifts at the Temple are asked to work four Saturday afternoons a year at the Temple in addition to their regular shift.

Nina and I work the Friday early morning shift (which is followed by a Friday midday shift which is followed by a Friday evening shift). In addition to our normal Friday morning schedule, we are assigned to work the Saturday afternoon shift on April 24th and May 1st of this year. We’ll have that opportunity again in late October.

The Saturday afternoon shift begins at noon on Saturday and ends between 6:30 pm and 7:00 pm, depending on what our last assignment is for the day. Saturdays are generally quite busy at the Temple, depending on the weather. The better the weather, the lower the attendance. The “wild card” in that has to do with how many weddings are scheduled for a particular Saturday. In addition, some wards or stakes will schedule a special event day at the Temple. On this particular Saturday, a stake in the area scheduled a special “women in white” event and 96 women came from the Stake to a special meeting in the chapel in the temple followed by an endowment session.

Endowment sessions start every hour on the hour and end about 90 minutes later. The last session on Saturday starts at 5 p.m. and ends at about 6:30 p.m. On this Saturday the last session was completely full with about 130 patrons. All in all, this was an unusually busy Saturday afternoon. I prefer busy!

May 1st will be another Saturday afternoon in the Temple. I hope it is also a well-attended, busy afternoon.

TTFN!