Temple moments: `New aspect'
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In 1963, the year the 16-year-old South Carolina Stake was divided, two older sister missionaries began tracting a street in Columbia. Knocking on one door after another, they came to one where an 8-year-old boy peered out.
"You can come back," he said.Indeed, the sisters did come back and taught the little boy's mother, Virginia Phenix. Eventually, she and her husband, Claude, a surveyor, were baptized. The Phenix parents made sure their sons, Claude, the 8-year-old; and his younger brothers, Glen and David, were baptized and attended regularly.
As the years passed, the boys progressed in the gospel. They gave pennies to the Primary Children's Hospital, graduated from Primary and received the Aaronic Priesthood. Claude and Glen served missions, and both married in the temple - without their parents attending. Their parents were never both quite ready to go to the temple.
"After all those years of them not going to the temple, you sort of convinced yourself that their being sealed was not going to happen," said Glen.
He and his brother submitted dozens of family names for temple work. Because of the distance to the temple, they asked others to do the ordinance work for them.
Then it came, "right out of the blue," said Glen.
"My parents announced that they were going to the temple. At first I didn't believe it."
But the parents soon made believers of their sons and the family traveled to the Atlanta Georgia Temple to be sealed. When they arrived at the temple the day after Thanksgiving in 1990, "it was an occasion never to be forgotten, to kneel and be sealed to our parents 27 years after the missionaries knocked on our door," said Glen.
Then came another surprise. An alert temple worker reminded the Phenix's that there were many sealings in their family file remaining to be done. So on that November day, generation after generation was linked by the Holy Priesthood, 10 in all, some lines back to 1645.
Reflecting on that day, Glen, now president of the Pensacola Florida Stake, commented: "It was a feeling of reclaiming something you thought was lost. It was almost as if we had found parents we had never known, and a new aspect we had never seen."
