Joseph F. Smith's Promise to Ma Manuhii: She Would Live to Attend the Laie Temple (Fulfilled 1919)

In the early 1850s, Nā'oheakamalu "Ma" Manuhii, a native Hawaiian convert on Maui, and her husband cared for a severely ill fifteen-year-old missionary — Joseph F. Smith, an orphan who had lost his father, Hyrum Smith, at age five and his mother, Mary Fielding Smith, just before his 1854 call to the Sandwich Islands. She had been a mother to him, and he never forgot it.

More than fifty years later, in 1909, when President Joseph F. Smith — now President of the Church — landed at the wharf in Honolulu, a poor, blind woman of about ninety was led through the crowd calling "Iosepa, Iosepa" (Joseph). She had brought the best gift she could afford: a few choice bananas — her all, her offering. He ran to her, clasped her in his arms, kissed her over and over, patting her head and saying, "Mama, Mama, my dear old Mama." With tears streaming down his cheeks he told his companion Charles W. Nibley: "Charlie, she nursed me when I was a boy, sick and without anyone to care for me. She took me in and was a mother to me."

In 1915, when Ma learned her beloved Iosepa would visit the islands again, she waited days on the steps of the mission house in Honolulu for his arrival. Before his departure he promised the blind, elderly sister that she would live to receive her blessings in the House of the Lord — a promise recorded by Elder Isaac Homer Smith, then serving in Honolulu. Three months later, in the October 1915 general conference, President Joseph F. Smith proposed the construction of a temple in Hawaii, and it was unanimously approved.

President Smith did not live to see it — he died November 19, 1918 — but Ma did. When the Laie Hawaii Temple opened in late November 1919, Ma Manuhii, in her nineties and among the first to attend, was carried through the temple to receive her blessings and be sealed to her husband. While she was in the temple, she heard the voice of Joseph F. Smith tell her "Aloha," and a dove flew in through an open window and alighted on her bench. Expressing her feeling of deep contentment, Ma passed away about a week later. She is buried near the temple, and a statue of her now stands beside it in honor of her, and of so many others, whose faith laid the foundation for a temple in Hawaii.