An Amazing Temple Story

Knute Klavenes: Building The Temple Converted Him

The Cebu City Philippines  temple was dedicated on Sunday, and two days later the builder  will go through to take out his own endowment.  Building the  temple convinced him the gospel was true. 

Two days  before the Cebu City Philippines Temple dedication, everyone on  the temple grounds is already dressed in their best, in suits or  dresses, because the prophet and apostles are arriving  today.  Everyone, that is, except for one man, who carries an  air of authority about him in a plaid shirt with an unbuttoned  collar.

Indeed, all the workers, who are touching up  and fixing up after the temple open house, respond to him with  respect and immediacy, watch him for cues.

He is Knute Klavenes, the 40-year-old builder of the temple — and every  other building on the temple lot, including a stake center, patron  housing, one home each for the temple president and the mission  president, a retention pond, and an invisible and underground  sewage treatment plant. 

   These are so many buildings, in fact, that  someone has aptly named this temple lot “a city on a hill,” and it  certainly took that much complexity to build  it.

Knute, with a Tongan mother and Norwegian father,  hails from New Zealand and carries the accent that marks the  place.  Yet the accent of authority that has garnered him so  much respect comes from experience.  This is the third temple  he’s built since he managed the temple building in Tonga and  helped in the refurbishing of Tahiti . 

  

 Being a temple builder means there is a  standard of perfection and excellence that is required in the  finished project that is unmatched in any other edifice.   This is the House of the Lord and, therefore, nothing, not one  thing, can be amiss. The paint on the back side of a column near  the ceiling that no one will ever see still has to be flawless.  

One area in the Cebu City temple was repainted  18 times to get it to the level of superiority required to be  acceptable in a temple.  Temples have to be earthquake-proof  and sound, beautiful and soaring, built to last 500 years or  longer.  A thousand details that will never be visible to the  eye have to work together to lift this building to take its place  as being worthy. 

This Cebu City temple will always stand out for  him personally, however, because it is in this temple that he  built that he will take out his own endowment two days after it is  dedicated (the temple was dedicated June 13, 2010).

 It is building the temples that began to urge  him to conversion.  “I started out by wanting to know what I  was building and what the meaning of it was,” said Knute, “and it  just grew from there.”  Someone gave him a copy of The Book  of Mormon, and he began reading.
He was also impressed with his  counterparts in the temple department. “I started becoming  impressed with their morals and beliefs.  They were so  focused and intent on what they were doing.  I thought, I’ve  got to get some of that.” 

 Yet it was more, a flow of events and  circumstances in building the temple that was just  unexplainable.  Things working together when for all intents  and purposes, they shouldn’t have. He said, “You can do all the  plans in the world with contingencies a, b, and c, and still  everything happens wrong as you are working along.  Your best  efforts aren’t enough. Then the day it has to work, everything  clicks into place again.  It turns out well.
“So many  things happen like that when you are working on a temple.   You think something is wrong.  It couldn’t have happened the  way it did and then be finished in a positive way.  It’s  amazing.” 

   The flow of things was managed from a higher  source, and Knute said, “I just came to see I was an instrument in  his hands.” 

   As in all of our lives, most of this is hard to  describe or point to specific incidents, but some are clear.   The fact that Knute even came to build temples was surprising. He  had left the construction business for three years because of a  downturn in the New Zealand economy, but he felt what he describes  as a “real strong calling” to go back into construction though it  made no sense.  

   The first month he had no business, but almost  immediately after that, the owner of the business said he had a  project coming up and asked if Knute would take it.  

“With most complex construction drawings,”  Knute said, “you have to look at the site and study them to figure  them out.  For some reason, I can look at temple drawings and  understand them without having to spend too much time on it. I look at a temple drawing and I just know what’s going to  happen. With other projects I am sometimes scratching my head and saying what are we going to do about this or that part of  it. 

“The one thing I’ve always believed is that if  this is the house of the Lord, he’s going to do what he wants with  it,” he said, and somehow the complexity of the drawings is  immediately clear to him.
   Then there are all the things that seem little,  but are simply dumbfounding.  He had so many spiritual  moments working on the temple that he started to talk to the Lord  in the car on the way to work in the morning, “Let’s have another  good day, and please let all my workers show up.”
   On the Tonga temple project, Knute said, “We  were doing the regilding of the angel Moroni and we had to build a  very high scaffold.  Dale Jolley flew out from Salt Lake to  do that work, and for two weeks before there was gusty wind and  rain.  It was unsafe as we were building the scaffolding, but  when we built the enclosure for him to work, it became like a sail  in the wind and so dangerous.

Dale was only going to be there three days,  so we had a prayer to make sure everything was OK.  The  morning he started we had perfect weather conditions, which lasted  three days until he left.  As soon as he got on the plane,  the rain and the wind started up again in a fury.”

 Then there was the time that there was a heated  discussion about something in the drawings right before the sign  that said “Holiness to the Lord.”  There was no wind, but  suddenly a gust of wind blew the drawings out of the hands of the  one party, and blew them entirely around the entire square  building and right back into his hands.
   “Physics wouldn’t allow this,” said  Knute.  “It was against the law of physics, but it happened  before our eyes.”  The resolution of the fiery discussion  became clear.

“My biggest moment,” said Knute, “was here  in the sealing room.  I came back from Manila , where I had  been inspecting furniture, on a Friday evening.  It was quite  late, but I thought I’ll just go by the temple to make sure  everything is OK.

“I went inside the sealing room, and as  soon as I went in, I could tell the Spirit was there.  It was  very, very strong. As soon as I walked in, I just wanted to  cry.  It was the nicest feeling.  I was there for about  10 or 15 minutes, crying like a little baby. 

  “It was like someone was holding a book in  front of me showing me the construction, page by page, and all the  ways we had been blessed and helped, and I was being told to  remember these things.

“Then a year ago, Bishop Keith McMullin of  the Presiding Bishopric came on a visit, and that’s when I made my  final decision.  He said that since you have to be baptized  twelve months before you can go to the temple, you better hurry  and be baptized, so you can take out your endowment when the Cebu  City Temple is dedicated.
   “That’s when I made my decision.”
   Knute’s wife, Melenau (pronounced like Mary),  has been active in the Church her whole life, but only learned  when she went back to Tonga and talked to her grandparents that  she had never been baptized — only blessed as a baby!  It was  a complete surprise to her.  This she didn’t learn until  recently, so in an astonishing turn of events, last February,  Knute baptized his active wife.

When he received his endowment, she will not be  there. Now she is the one who will have to wait a year before she  can take out her endowment. They will be sealed next March in the  Cebu City temple, when he comes back from New Zealand to inspect  it.

Building a Temple , Building a  Life
Building a temple, Knute says, is like how you live your  life.  The smallest detail inside has to be correct so your  life can reflect that. You are the vessel and what you are trying  to do is live your life the best you can, which means that all  those little connections have to be right.

 In a temple, if you don’t get the timbers  perfect, they won’t connect to the stone correctly, and so  forth.  You have to treat the smallest details of your life  with that kind of care.
Knute learned more than that from  building this temple.  In his 90 to 110 hours per week of  labor, he was directing some times up to 1200 construction  workers, 90% of whom had never worked on a project anywhere near  this kind of craftsmanship and care.  That means they had to  be retrained.
   “I had to get them to understand that they were  not just building another building; they were building something  special,” he said. 

  “I got some sponges, and I had to fill them up  with water.  I had to give them a new mindset and also a  whole new set of skills.  Even the patron house and the  church are on a level of work that is different than anything you  find here.”
   All the workers were each given a new set of  tools as part of the bonus of working on the project, but they  were also given a new set of skills.  This could have been  immensely frustrating in the hands of most managers, but Knute  decided the best way to keep the employees working at the level  required was to appreciate them, treat them as human beings, which  sometimes doesn’t happen on construction jobs where workers ebb  and flow. 

 “I was always massaging them, hugging them,  asking them ‘how’s your family?’ trying to keep them happy on  their job.” Frequently, he had dinner on the temple lot for all  the workers, as another way of showing them that he appreciated  the job they were doing.
“If a worker feels appreciated, he’ll  still keep doing good work,” he said. “It’s constantly making them  feel good about their job.”
   Building a temple also means there are  unbelievable surprises, but never more so than on this one.   They were excavating just in front of the main entrance, when  Knute got a call, that they’d found a big hole — and then that  hole just kept going. The entire temple lot was riddled with  tunnels created by Japanese soldiers in World War II.  

It was a warren of tunnels fifteen to twenty  feet down that interconnected and split off heading in different  directions and well beyond the temple lot.  They had to check  them for safety, including gases and leftover bombs. They had to  explore them with ultrasound to understand the extent of  them.  Then finally, they had to fill them all with concrete  — at least 28 truckloads full.  Then they had to re-stabilize  the soil.
   “We lost a lot of time because of this,” Knute  said, in what is certainly a great understatement.

 But temples have to be solid and stable, and  superior in every detail.  Everything about this one changed  Knute’s life — especially the Tuesday after dedication, when he  began building his life on a new foundation.  

From 2010