Dr. Salesi Havili's Prayer Restores His Patient's Heartbeat After Twenty-Five Minutes (Vava‘u, Tonga, c. 1978)

Dr. Salesi Havili, an anesthesiologist at the small Vava‘u Hospital in Tonga, had joined the Church with his wife Selu in 1977 and was preparing to go to the temple. During surgery on an elderly patient, Mafi Vakaloa — operated on within the limitations of an island hospital by two surgeons with Dr. Havili as anesthesiologist — the nurse whispered that she could no longer feel the patient's pulse: Mafi had died on the operating table. Dr. Havili panicked, checked and rechecked everything, and exhausted every medical resource he had. Then he began to pray — first a shallow, desperate prayer, then again and again, as guilt and doubt dominated him, too aware medically that his patient was dead. Eighteen minutes had passed since the heart had stopped. He came to feel that Mafi's life depended on the sincerity of his prayer, almost as a test of faith on the eve of going to the temple, and prayed with a fervor and intimacy unmatched in his previous prayers, promising the Lord a total concentration of his life if the man could be revived. When he finally prayed until he knew that when he opened his eyes the heart would begin beating — after twenty-five minutes without a heartbeat — it was miraculously so. Mafi Vakaloa recovered fully; the next morning Dr. Havili found him alert, articulate, and alive, with his wife sitting on the edge of his bed.