(Originally published on January 7, 2021)
I don’t remember when this happened, exactly. It was in the temple, and I don’t remember which temple it was, but it was in one of the sealing rooms after a sealing ceremony. Following the ceremony, my husband and I stood together while he spoke with the officiating temple worker and the participants in the ceremony. I looked into a mirror that was just to my left and had a most interesting experience.
I don’t know how to best describe this experience. It was as if my consciousness was pulled into the mirror. It felt as though, within the mirror, there existed another room—another world. I could feel the dimensions of the room. It wasn’t a two-dimensional image hanging on a wall anymore. It was a three-dimensional space and my spirit was in it. While I was aware of my physical body in the physical sealing room, my spirit had more spatial awareness within the mirror—the environment there was more real to me.
That experience lasted less than a minute, but it made an indelible impression upon me and has been incredibly significant to me. It has been something that I ponder about fairly often. It was unlike anything that I had ever experienced while awake up to that point.
The Lord has used that experience to teach me many things on many occasions. A couple of mornings ago, in prayer, he taught me again. I was asking the Lord a lot of questions and bringing up topics that I feel like I don’t understand as well as I need to. I asked Him about how my physical body can be purified and refined so that I can endure more of the information that He desires to send to me. He reminded me about the experience with the mirror. He taught me that images in a mirror are a consequence of light. If I wanted to have my body purified and obtain the knowledge and experiences I desired, I needed to brave, enter into, and dwell in the light to a greater degree than I do already. The environment of the light had to become more real and tangible to me—an environment that was more familiar to me—than my immediate physical environment, even while my body exists in this physical environment. He taught me that as my consistent time in the light approaches constant, the light will have a purging effect on all of the ideas and opinions I hold that are false and that it will have an edifying effect on those ideas that are based in truth and righteousness.