You are a beautiful sight. I am grateful for the privilege of being with you today. We do not get to pick and choose our assignments very often. So, we are grateful when we get of what we really like. We all like this one. We love you!
I am grateful for the words of counsel and the promises you have heard from my companions this morning, [President] Johnson and Elder Rasband. I endorse them heartly and wholly. I am grateful to be here with our Church Commissioner of Education and all of the staff and members of our Executive Committee and leaders of our Church Education System schools. They are wonderful men and women. We are grateful for all that they accomplish and for the dedication of their lives to the welfare of Zion, especially to the youth of Zion. We are grateful for President and Sister Kauwe and all who serve with them here. We admire them. We have had a wonderful day together yesterday and our admiration has only grown in that experience.
I would like to say a word today about the heritage of this school and of this place. I want to honor those who have gone before us and their sacrifices. And I want to urge all of us to keep faith with this legacy and build upon it.
You, the students, faculty, administration, and staff of BYU–Hawaii come from all over the world. You bring with you many talents. This beautiful choir is one example, one bright shining example today. You are bright and gifted. You have high hopes and goals. I trust you recognize that God has been mindful of you and that He has blessed you and has given you His Spirit to be with you. We are proud of you. We have every reason to expect that each of you will succeed in life and in your families, and that you will contribute measurably in the Lord’s great latter-day work.
But we should remember that we all owe a debt of gratitude to those who have gone before us. We build our lives and successes on the foundation and sacrifices of our predecessors. We owe a great debt to the Prophet Joseph Smith in this dispensation and to the faithful people of all past dispensations and generations. That includes the pioneers of the Lord’s work in the Hawaiian Islands, and especially in Laie. Let us thank God for them and humbly add our part to what they accomplished. Let us work as hard as they did to build Zion.
History tells us that in ancient times, Laie was “a pu’uhonua, or place of refuge wherein transgressors of law or custom could come to be cleansed of their transgressions and return to society.” [1] Just as ancient Israel established sanctuary cities, so also did the early peoples of these islands. It seems most appropriate then that Laie should have become a place of refuge and gathering for the Latter-day Saints.
The first tender branches of the Church and kingdom of God began to sprout here with the arrival of missionaries from Honolulu in December 1850. Four years later, a 15-year-old orphan boy came as a missionary needing refuge and a place to grow into manhood. He found that here, and what began in Hawaii eventually produced a great latter-day prophet, Joseph F. Smith, the beloved “Iosepa.” The fledgling Church struggled to survive against neglect, persecution, poverty, and apostasy, but with the purchase of Thomas T. Dougherty’s 6,000-acre plantation called “Laie” in January 1865, the Saints had a safe place to gather.
Laie grew from a plantation to a community of Saints. Kings and queens, a president of the United States, and apostles of the Lord have visited here and have praised the children, the families, the order, the beauty, and the spirit of Laie. Apostles and prophets have borne testimony of the blessings and favors of heaven bestowed upon this place, and then have pronounced added blessings upon the land and the people. Chapels, schools and a university have grown up, and most importantly, a temple.
Those who went before and built up the Church and kingdom of God in these islands were not perfect. Not all their decisions were the right ones or bore the fruit that was expected. What is most significant, however, is that so many of them persevered. They rose each day and went to work. They prayed and worked some more. When they needed to, they repented and began again. They loved and taught their children and each other’s children. They reached out to others with the gospel of Jesus Christ. They endured disappointment and poverty and hardship. But they also enjoyed life with luaus and swimming and dancing and telling stories and laughing. Those who were called to lead did their best to feed the Lord’s sheep, and the people kept faith with the Lord and their leaders.
Somehow with God’s blessing beginning with almost nothing, all those small, humble individual efforts have grown into this temple, this university, this cultural center. Thousands have qualified for salvation and eternal life, and have gone on to their reward. Other millions are blessed by the influence of those who lived, studied, served and worshipped here, and are extending those blessings to others, especially in their own families in many parts of the world. Yet none would say that this flows from their own efforts and sacrifices alone. All recognize the benevolent influence of good people in their lives, and all recognize the hand of the Lord. I am reminded of Paul’s declaration: “Who then is Paul, and who is Apollos, but ministers by who ye believed, …? I have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase.” [2]
Let me mention just one of the many instances of God “giving the increase” in Laie. Those who know the history of this place will recognize the name of Samuel E. Woolley. President Woolley served twenty-six years as mission president and manager of the Laie plantation from 1895 to 1921. [3] In 1916, following the groundbreaking for the temple at Laie, President Joseph F. Smith, in a decision that surprised everyone, appointed Samuel Woolley’s son, Ralph, to supervise the temple’s construction. In later years, Ralph served as Oahu Stake president, but at this time he was a young, single man who had just graduated four years earlier at the University of Utah with a degree in engineering. Neither he nor his father thought he was qualified, but the Prophet insisted, and so it fell to Ralph Woolley to build the temple.
During the temple construction, the United States became embroiled in the World War that was then raging. Shipping became difficult and some commodities became scarce, including lumber. Oral histories including remembrances of Ralph Woolley’s widow, Romania, record the miraculous answer to prayer that came when it appeared that construction of the temple would have to stop:
And so it was during this pressure time that Ralph found his way to the [I Hemolele] chapel and went up into the belfry and knelt down and called on the Lord to please help. He needed lumber, for the Temple Work couldn’t go on. Now when he left the chapel and joined the men up at the Temple, he was told that there was a lumber ship that had gone adrift out here in Laie Bay, between Goat Island and the other island. He was so surprised that there would be a lumber ship this way because usually the ships go right to Honolulu. How come this ship got off course and came out here to Laie, and of all things, to get stuck on the reef out there. Now he called Honolulu and [contacted the owners] and told them that he needed lumber, and they said to him “We don’t know how that ship got there. You can have the lumber, because we don’t know what we’re going to do to get that ship off the reef.” So the missionaries were used, as well as the fathers and the sons of the Laie community to go out to that ship. They either swam out or they canoed out or else they walked to Goat Island and it wasn’t too far to go on to the ship. And then they would climb the ship, up on to the ship, and then, I was told, they tied lumber together to form sort of a raft and they tossed it overboard. Then one fellow would jump after it and push it. With the waves pushing from the back they got the lumber on shore. [4]
And so it was that the Lord provided. Clinton Kanahele testified, “That is evidence that God hears the prayers of the Saints. God hears. That was a great sign. The steamer went aground.” [5]
It is a serious, even sacred thing to build upon the work and achievements of those who have been diligent in their time. We take strength from our forbears. And now we must do our part. This is our day; this is our season.
In 1947, President J. Reuben Clark, then a member of the First Presidency, spoke in General Conference in tribute to the pioneers who, beginning 100 years earlier had come to the Salt Lake Valley and established Zion in the Great Basin. He remembered and honored them as we remember and honor pioneers here today. President Clark’s talk was titled, “To Them of the Last Wagon.” In concluding his classic address, President Clark said :
In living our lives let us never forget that the deeds of our fathers and mothers are theirs, not ours; that their works cannot be counted to our glory; that we can claim no excellence and no place because of what they did, that we must rise by our own labor, and that labor failing, we shall fall. We may claim no honor, no reward, no respect, nor special position or recognition, no credit because of what our fathers were or what they wrought. We stand upon our own feet in our own shoes. There is no aristocracy of birth in this Church; it belongs equally to the highest and the lowliest; for as Peter said to Cornelius, the Roman centurion seeking him: “Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons: But in every nation he that feareth him, and worketh righteousness, is accepted with him” (Acts 10:34-35). [6]
May we be resolved to measure to our duties and opportunities in our time and season as those who have gone before measured to theirs. Let us take inspiration from them and their legacy and join their spiritual aristocracy, not by any right of inheritance, but by serving the Lord as they did, and by being true to all that is entrusted to us by God as they were true.
In ancient times, the children of Israel brought gifts, offerings, and sacrifices when they came to the temple. After making Himself an offering for sin, the Resurrected Lord said He would no longer accept burnt offerings from His people. Rather the only acceptable sacrifice would be “a broken heart and a contrite spirit.” [7] In other words, the offering He ultimately desires is not something we possess, rather it is ourselves—what we are and what we are becoming through repentance and obedience to Him and by His grace. Upon the collective sacrifice of those who have gone before us in this place, let us humbly place an offering of our own consecrated lives.
I pray that each of us will honor our forbears by honoring our covenants with God our Heavenly Father and His Son Jesus Christ.
Remember, you are the forebearers of future generations. You are precious to God. You are precious to your Savior. Of their living reality, I bear witness and invoke their blessings upon you, each and everyone.
In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.
Notes:
[1] Riley M. Moffat, Fred E. Woods, and Jeffrey N. Walker, Gathering to La’ie, Mormons in the Pacific Series [2011], 2.
[2] 1 Corinthians 3:5-6
[3] Riley M. Moffat, Fred E. Woods, and Jeffrey N. Walker, Gathering to La’ie, Mormons in the Pacific Series [2011], 82.
[4] Riley M. Moffat, Fred E. Woods, and Jeffrey N. Walker, Gathering to La’ie, Mormons in the Pacific Series [2011], 113-114.
[5] Riley M. Moffat, Fred E. Woods, and Jeffrey N. Walker, Gathering to La’ie, Mormons in the Pacific Series [2011], 115.
[6] J. Reuben Clark Jr., in Conference Report, October 1947, 160.
[7] 3 Nephi 9:20