Saturday, March 18, 2017

Going Above and Beyond - Sister Robe

Meet Sister Robe.  (Pronounced Row-bee)

She is the oldest temple worker here in the Preston Temple - 87 years young.  While she used to serve in all areas, there are a few assignments that she can no longer do, but she can and does keep the Clothing Area in tip-top shape!  (In this temple, Ordinance Workers take turns manning the Clothing Rental.)  Unless there are patrons who need assistance, or items to fold, the rest of us do a surface check of the stacks and rows of the hundreds of clothing items, then are happy to spend the rest of our assigned time in Clothing reading from the Scriptures or Conference Talks.  Not Sister Robe.  She checks EVERY pair of pants to make sure they are in the right stack and refolds them - correctly; she goes through every white jacket to make sure the paperwork in the pocket is accurate; she re-stacks the piles of shoes to make them neater.  She often misses her other assignments because her work in the Clothing area is not finished to her standards.

But my favorite thing about her is that she always comes a half hour or more before her shift is supposed to begin, and goes through EVERY locker in the Sister's Locker Room, and checks the hangers.  There are supposed to be two hangers in every locker.  And they are to be of a certain type.  She starts out armed with several of the "correct" style of hangers, and ends with an armful of "wrong" hangers, that she puts in their "right" place.  Nobody asks her to do this.  She just knows that the House of the Lord is a House of Order, and to her, the clothing and the lockers are where she can make a difference.

The timing of her shift does not coincide with ours, so I went back to the Temple on Friday (notice the green for St. Patrick's Day!) and took this picture with her (in the waiting room outside the Recommend Desk area.)  It broke my heart that I didn't have a car to give her a ride home, as there was a torrential rain storm.  She assured me that she had a "stick" (what people here call canes) and was used to walking and catching the bus in the rain when she comes to do her Temple shift each week.  What a wonderful example!



3 comments:

  1. What an inspiration! I loved reading about her and I love that you went back to get a picture so we could have a face with the name.

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  2. Mom, what a sweetheart! That is such dedication.

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  3. I loved this story! I'm sad I somehow missed reading it last week! She's so cute! What a great example to us all!

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