Anything is Possible
Thank you Mahana, The Beautiful. You know, I built the sets for the movie Johnny Lingo, I even built the canoe used at the beginning. David Jacob, a good friend of ours, was with the filming crew at the set of Johnny Lingo. He walked over while I was talking with the director and asked me, “How is Mahana?” The director heard the name and said to David, “That’s the name we want to use for the leading girl.” The director asked me if they could use her name and I said, “yes,” for my wife. Mahana means sunshine and she is worth more than the eight cows that Johnny Lingo gave her father.
ALOHA and Malo e lelei! Today I will share a few examples from my life that teach us that “Anything is Possible.” I will base my remarks on these two scriptures.
In Luke 18:27 it says, "…The things which are impossible with men are possible with God."
In Mark 14:34-36 it says,
And saith unto them, My soul is exceeding sorrowful unto death: tarry ye here, and watch.
And he went forward a little, and fell on the ground, and prayed that, if it were possible, the hour might pass from him.
And he said, Abba, Father, all things are possible unto thee; take away this cup from me: nevertheless not what I will, but what thou wilt.
A simple prayer
Let me begin my story with an answer to simple prayer. In December 1959, I was released as a labor missionary in Tonga and went home to my island of Pangai to be with my family. My parents were on a mission at the time at the big island. While there, I heard the news that the Church called 25 building missionaries to go to Hawaii to build the Polynesian Cultural Center. Oh how I wanted to be one of them. But I was not. There were only two of them called from my island.
Immediately after I heard the news, I went to my room and knelt in prayer, very simply, I said, “Heavenly Father, please send me to Hawaii as a missionary if thou seest that I can be of help.” With all my heart I asked, and I said Amen. During this week President Mendenhall, the chairman of the Church building committee, traveled to New Zealand to call Maori building missionaries to the project in Hawaii. In that meeting, he called 12 Maori men to go to Hawaii. In his talk he announced, “I have called 30 Tongan missionaries to go to Hawaii.” At the end of the meeting my former supervisor from the mission, who was there with him, walked up to President Mendenhall and said, “In your talk you said you called 30 missionaries in Tonga, but you called only 25.” President Mendenhall told him, “when you go back to Tonga, tell the mission president to call 5 more.” And I was one of those 5.
I can tell you that right from that moment, what seemed impossible became possible through God. He answered my simple prayer and through His will I was able to help and play a very big part in that mission in Hawaii. I served three years and nine months. I operated all of our heavy equipment and mixed all of the cement for not just the PCC, but all the projects we completed at the time including the additional dorms for the CCH (Hales 3 to 6), basement and two wings on the Hawaiian temple, housing for the temple President and temple workers, housing for faculty on Moana street, the Laie Stake Center and Hau’ula Makai Chapel, and the temple visitor’s center. All these additional projects were completed before we started work on the PCC. When President Tanner told us that BYU-Hawaii saved a lot of money by not having to break down the old dorms because they were strong enough to build another floor on, I was very happy because I mixed that concrete.
A brief history of the Church building missionary program
For those of you who never heard of it, the idea for the building missionary program started in Tonga when the Church leased some land to build Liahona High School in 1947. The mission president asked the priesthood brethren to come to Liahona to help clean up the land to make room for the buildings. Since there was no heavy machinery there at the time, all the work had to be done by hand. I remember when my father sailed on a boat to Tongatapu to volunteer at the Liahona clearing project. He went there a few times to spend a month at a time working on cleaning up the site. The Church leaders saw this and started the Church Building Program. President David O. McKay called President Wendell Mendenhall to chair the Church Building committee and he called supervisors from the mainland who were sent down to Tonga, Samoa and New Zealand to build the schools and chapels, and train local builders.
President Mendenhall told us that the Church was able to save a lot of money because of the building missionary program. This allowed the Church to build many chapels.
A short history of missionary service in my family
My parents converted to the Church with their seven children at the time. Later there were six more of us who were born into the Church, and I was number 13, the youngest of 7 boys, and blessed to be born into the Church. My dad was the branch president for many years and later my parents were called on a mission. While my parents were on their mission, a brother and his wife were also on a proselyting mission, and I had two brothers and a sister and her husband and I who were called to the Church Building Missionary Program. So, there were 5 of us children and our parents on a mission at the same time. How were we able to support ourselves? I don’t know, but I do know the Lord made it possible for us to accomplish. We did it the Lord’s way. And He took care of everything. I remember I had only two work pants and two work shirts and one shirt and one lavalava for church. I had to do washing during the week so I could wear clean clothes. There was no one to support us because our parents were on a mission at the same time. But I never had to stop going to work or to church because there were no clothes.
Ten dollars
When leaving Tonga for Hawaii in March 1960, my parents were still on their mission in Tongatapu. During this time in Tonga, members of the Church would sell everything they owned in order to earn the fare to go to New Zealand to attend the temple and receive temple ordinances. I knew my parents wouldn’t be able to go because they did not have enough money. So I made myself a promise - if I find some money in Hawaii, I will save it to send my parents to the temple. When we got to Hawaii we found that the Church took good care of us. They provided everything we needed, plus we were given ten dollars in cash every month so we could buy soda, ice cream, and go to the movie.
When I received my first $10, I remembered the promise I made. So I took it to Lola, my supervisor’s wife, and asked her to please make me a savings account and put this ten dollars in it, and told her what it was for. She helped me do that and also offered to donate an additional $10 a month to my account if I would come and clean their yard. Her neighbor found out what I was doing and offered to donate $10 to my account for cleaning her yard. There were others who also donated. By the summer of 1962, I collected enough money to send my parents to New Zealand to the temple. One of my brother’s wrote me a letter and said, it may seem that you love our parents more than we do, but that is just because you were in the position to help them to go to the temple, but we love them just the same.
Watermelon - Who likes watermelon? I love watermelon.
I had other goals that would require even more money and the help of the Lord. I wanted to marry Mahana, and I wanted to return to Tonga after the labor mission and then come back to school at CCH in Laie. The Lord provided a way for me to accomplish my goals because I did not have the means as a labor missionary.
In the summer of 1963 I went to an old Hawaiian man who grew watermelons next door to the labor missionaries, and asked him if he could help me plant some watermelons. He said yes. So I took a machine to a piece of land that used to be planted with sugar cane next to the PCC site. I cleared the land and prepared the ground and the man helped me plant the watermelon seeds there. That year there was a big flood in Laie and it washed away my watermelon field that had just started to grow. After the flooding cleared, I went back to the old man for help, I got the machine again and plowed the land and planted more watermelon. This time it grew nicely and bore a lot of melons. When the melon crop was ready, the old man told me to pick the melon and go and sell it at the village. I used a jeep that I used at work and loaded it with watermelon after work. I drove it to the village and sold it for 10 cents a pound.
By the end of the season I earned a little over $700 for selling watermelon on the side. So I took the money to the old man and told him this is the money I got from selling melon. He said, you keep the money and at the end of the picking for the field you grew, I will see if there is more money to give you. I said, “No” this is enough for me. I took some of the money and bought an engagement ring for my wife-to-be. I took her out on her birthday, October 19, 1963, this was during the week of the PCC dedication, and proposed to her and gave her the ring. With the remaining money I bought a return trip ticket from Tonga so I could return back to school. This was the reason why I wanted to plant the watermelon, so I could get money to buy my return ticket so I could come back to school at CCH. I went home after being released from my mission in December 1963. I gave the rest of the money to my mom and then returned to attend CCH in February 1964. We were married in June 1964 and have now been married 53 years.
These two stories, the $10 and the watermelon, show that with God, a penniless young man from Tonga can gather enough money to help do His will in sending his parents to the temple and finding eternal marriage.
PCC - My best friends for life
The Polynesian Cultural Center was originally planned to be built where the married student housing is now, next to the temple. We prepared the site, got the lagoon in and then got word from Salt Lake that it was too close to the temple and should not be built there. Instead it should be built along Kamehameha Highway. Because I was the heavy equipment operator, I took the bulldozer down and cleared the land at the highway. After the land was ready we started building the PCC in 1962. We got all the materials for the huts and started to build the villages. When we were building the Tongan village, we Tongan labor missionaries were somehow not happy with what we saw we were doing, it did not seem right. So we decided, six weeks before the dedication, that we would build a REAL Tongan fale, which is called the Queen’s house today. We brought in two men from Tonga who were experts in Tongan structures and went to work. Our supervisors told us that we would have to do this on our own time because we still had a lot of work to do on other parts of the Center. So we would work until quitting time at 3:30PM and then after that work on the Queen’s house on our own time, later into the evening. We sent someone to Tonga to ask the Queen for materials to decorate the house. The Queen gave us a lot of tapa and mats to use in the interior of the building. We finished it right before the dedication of PCC was to take place and we were happy that we did that for the Tongan village. Anything is possible.
I am so grateful for PCC because it was PCC that gave me the opportunity to come to Hawaii and learn and grow and do the things that I know how to do today. I am willing to help PCC at any time to help make it a very successful place so that anyone can enjoy it.
The ‘Iosepa
One day Uncle Bill Wallace, the first director of the Hawaiian Studies program, came to me and asked if I can build a Hawaiian wa’a kaulua for the Hawaiian studies program. “Yes, I’d loved to do it. When?” I said. Of course it is koa wood that Hawaiians use to make their canoes. I looked into it and Bill also looked into it to try to find the wood, but we couldn’t find someone who could supply a big enough log for a 50 foot double hull canoe. Well, I left for Tonga to build a Tongan, traditional, 100-foot, double hull, sailing canoe which took me a year and a half to complete. When I completed that project, while still in Tonga, Bill called and asked if I could order the same wood that I used in the Tongan canoe, which came from Fiji. I did and came home in December 2000 and the logs arrived in Laie in March 2001. We started on the Iosepa in March and completed it in August of the same year. It took us only six months to complete the project. We invited the community to come out and help and the Hawaiian Studies students came out to help also. People from Laie, and from throughout the island, showed up every day to help out in the work. That is how we got the ‘Iosepa done so soon. David Eskaran and I needed that help and we got it thanks to the spirit of the ‘Iosepa that was there. It was the help and spirit of the community that made it possible to finish the canoe in that short period of time.
One evening after the ‘Iosepa was completed, I was there by myself. I stepped away from the canoe and took a good look at it and said, “Wow! What a beautiful boat!” And a feeling came over me and I thanked Heavenly Father for helping us to build such a beautiful canoe. For making it possible to accomplish such a great feat.
Conclusion
John Ruskin wrote,
“When we build, let us think that we build forever. Let it not be for present delight nor for present use alone. Let it be such work as our descendants will thank us for, and let us think, as we lay stone on stone, that a time is to come when those stones will be held sacred because our hands have touched them, and that men will say as they look upon the labours and wrought substance of them, ‘See! This our Fathers did for us.’”
When I came here to Hawaii, I was just a young restless guy who didn’t know much and did not speak much English. But in the service of God as a building missionary I learned all these things and developed my talents. As with the ‘Iosepa, on many of the projects that I worked on throughout my life, when I completed them and looked at the work I asked myself, “did I actually do that by myself? There’s gotta be somebody else who helped me.” I know that God has helped me accomplish the impossible and He will help you.
[1] Luke 18:27
[2] Mark 14:34-36
[3] John Ruskin