Getting to the Temple

Chhom Koemly, Cambodia

Since the time of our baptism in 2001, my husband and I had many conversations about traveling to the temple with our family to be sealed together for eternity. However, our plans came to a halt when he was diagnosed with liver disease and passed away before we could go.

I was heartbroken, but my desire for our family to be sealed for eternity grew even stronger after my husband’s death. As a widowed mother of four children, however, I knew it would not be easy to raise the money needed to take my family from Cambodia to the Hong Kong China Temple—roughly 1,000 miles (1,600 km) away.

Despite our meager income, my children and I knew that we needed to get to the temple so we could be sealed as a family for eternity. I continued to work hard doing laundry at a hotel while my children worked odd jobs. We slowly began to save a little money for our trip, but we soon realized that we might never be able to save enough.

Because we knew an eternal family was more valuable than anything we could have on earth, we decided to sell the only thing of value that we owned—my late husband’s motorbike. After we sold it for a significant amount of money, our hearts rejoiced to know that we would soon be able to be sealed to our beloved father and husband.

But our happiness was short-lived. One week after selling the motorbike, we returned from church to find that our home had been burglarized. When we discovered that the money from the sale of the motorbike was gone, we were grief stricken. For months after the break-in, we continued to pray that we could find a way to go to the temple.

After several months our prayers were answered when we were told that we could receive help from the Church’s General Temple Patron Assistance Fund.* My children and I rejoiced at the news and soon made our hoped-for trip to the temple.

Thanks to the generosity of other Latter-day Saints, we are now an eternal family.