One year after the announcement of the Hawaii Laie Mission, missionaries share how it has blessed their lives
Missionaries serving in the recently created Hawaii Laie Mission serve in a variety of capacities unique to their mission on the North Shore of Oahu. According to the missionaries, serving in a location graced by the footsteps of many visitors from all over the world gave them many opportunities to share the gospel. Even if the meetings are sometimes brief, they said they treasure the opportunities to plant seeds of truth and be witnesses of Christ.
Sister Japrix Weaver, a missionary from Cedar City, Utah, who had served in the Hawaii Laie Mission for 16 months, said, “I feel like I’ve grown a lot. I feel like every missionary does. It has been nice to see how I’ve strengthened my testimony. [I’ve] been able to witness how Jesus Christ helps a lot of people and how He’s a part of everyone’s life.” Weaver said while she was excited to see her family when she returned home, she would miss the people she had met in her time serving.
“I think all of Hawaii has the spirit of aloha that a lot of people talk about, with very loving people. Something we talk about amongst the missionaries is how Laie specifically combines the spirit of aloha with the spirit of Christ,” said Weaver. She said even when driving back from Honolulu, just getting closer and closer to the temple is a powerful feeling.
Responsibilities
The Laie Mission is unique, according to Weaver, because of the varying capacities in which missionaries serve to share the gospel in its special environment. The missionaries serve in the Temple Visitors’ Center and online teaching center, similar to the one used by missionaries serving in Temple Square in Salt Lake City, Utah. Through online teaching, the missionaries can talk to people all around the world and teach them about Jesus Christ. Once they have been taught enough, Weaver said they are referred to missionaries serving locally around them.
The sisters also serve at the Polynesian Cultural Center once or twice a week, acting as tour guides on the tram tour where they tell guests about the history of Laie and the temple. In addition to these responsibilities, the missionaries also have their assigned areas in the mission, with wards and families they minister to.
Weaver acknowledged how the responsibilities missionaries in Laie have can be difficult and seem daunting in the beginning because of skills that need to be learned. However, she said after a little while, things became less hard due to constant practice, always having something to do, or someone to serve.
Weaver said it was always very gratifying when people come up to them and asked to learn more about the gospel, whether at the Visitors’ Center or when teaching online.
For most of her mission, Weaver said she has served among young single adults in their wards. “There are students at [BYU–Hawaii] from all over the world. Visitors who come to the Visitors’ Center are from all over the world. So, I’ve learned a lot about so many cultures, different backgrounds. But specifically, I like to see how Jesus Christ is a part of everyone’s life. Some people don’t really see it for themselves, but we can kind of get a peek there of how He really is there for everyone, and the gospel is for everyone,” said Weaver.
Challenges in serving
Weaver said one of the hardest things about her mission has been not being able to be around visitors for very long. “People come here, and you can have a spiritual experience with them and see how the gospel would really bless their life, but then, maybe they’ll spend 30 minutes here, or less or more. Then they just go on their way, and you just hope they have another opportunity to meet missionaries,” explained Weaver.
“The ones that do end up having the return appointments and learning more I feel like are the ones who have met missionaries before or know members of the church,” she said. She emphasized how missionaries are sometimes meant to “plant seeds,” which may be nourished and harvested later on when a person comes into contact with other missionaries or church members.
“I think it also shows how the challenges you face become ways of growth and learning that you really just feel humbled and know God has a plan for those people too,” said Weaver.
Weaver said she sometimes felt the pressure to be happy all the time, but one of the tender mercies she said she received was the opportunity to serve in many YSA wards, full of many returned missionaries. She said the members were always showing love and concern for her, asking her how her mission was going. Being in YSA wards, she said, allowed her to know many of the members had gone through hard things too and helped her know she was not alone.
Weaver expanded, “I think everyone probably struggles with that one. Even in life you feel this expectation to show a perfect, happy life. But once you feel the joy of the gospel, you don’t have to necessarily put on that fake smile. It’s just your real smile and you feel the joy.”
Weaver added she reminds herself of her divine nature by testifying of Christ to others. She said, “As I’m teaching it, I’m learning it and growing that testimony stronger.” When she testifies to people about the gospel principle of God being their loving Heavenly Father, Weaver said she can feel the truth of the statement, and remembers God’s love is for her too.
She said another one of the greatest difficulties of serving a mission was learning how to trust in the Lord and align one’s will with His. “My personal plan is probably not going to happen, but God’s will happen,” said Weaver.
“Preach My Gospel: A Guide to Missionary Service” is a book used by missionaries to teach the gospel and is organized into five lessons to be taught to someone to prepare them to be baptized. Each lesson is divided into several principles to explain the gospel in simple ways. Although there is a structure to the lessons, the sisters emphasized the need to always have the spirit and not fall into teaching as if reading from a script.
Connections and silver linings
Another missionary from Bountiful, Utah, Sister Kiersten Erickson, who had been serving for 11 months, said, “I feel like the past couple months have made me realize that there is light at the end of the tunnel. I’m just trying to soak up every moment because I love it here too. The joy that missionary work brings is just so awesome.”
Erickson said she was very excited to receive her call to serve in the Laie Hawaii Temple Visitors’ Center because prior to deciding to serve, she said she applied to BYUH, but she did not get accepted. However, when she received the call to serve in Laie, she said she realized her initial disappointment had a silver lining. “It all made sense that I was meant to serve my mission here. And I had always wanted to serve at a Visitors’ Center.
“I have family who go to school here, and I have an ancestor who served his mission here too. … Laie does really have a special spirit about it with the temple, BYUH and the Polynesian Cultural Center.” She added much of the serene spirit of Laie is owed to the people who came before to build the town, the PCC, the temple and the university. “Definitely, God is aware of this little town.”
The ancestor Erickson mentioned was her great-great-grandfather who served in Laie before the temple was even built. He helped to build church buildings and helped to translate the Doctrine and Covenants in Hawaiian. “He was here for four years, and he didn’t want to leave. He just knew there was something special about it here.”
She felt a strong connection with her ancestor by serving in the same place he once served, Erikson said, explaining it keeps her going throughout the hard times of her mission.
Erickson said her favorite aspect of her missionary service was the community of Laie. “The aloha spirit is so strong and powerful, and you just feel like family here. She added, although she immensely misses her home and family, the love she has felt from the community has comforted her.
Worth the struggle
Erickson and her companion said while there are many blessings they feel while serving, they also sometimes feel a pressure to always appear or be happy. She said the pressure was strong early on in her service but said as she began to gain more experience as a missionary, she said she felt the gospel and talking about it brought her real joy.
“I feel like when I really remembered and turned to God for strength, I was able to just be myself and be happy. For me, as long as I’m doing my best and I’m all in then I know that I am a child of God and He loves me.”
Erickson said she received a tender mercy during her first transfer (six–week period) of her service, when she gave a virtual Visitors’ Center tour that she thought went horribly. A couple of months ago, she said the woman she had met in the virtual tour messaged her and had been trying to find her through the internet. The woman told Erickson because of the virtual tour, she had gotten baptized where she was living.
A missionary from Sacramento, California, Sister Emma Cahoon said, “The amount of amazing people we meet in here and the amount of miracles that we see every single day while in the Visitors’ Center and in Laie in general, far outweigh those little tiny struggles that are really only our personal struggles.”
Serving with an eternal companion
Sister Diedra Manaffey and her husband are serving in Laie on their sixth mission together. Originally from Cedar Hills, Utah, they had been serving at the Visitors’ Center for about nine months.
The couple has served in Montreal, Canada; in Rochester, New York, at the Joseph Smith farm; Lyon, France, (Elder Mahaffey’s mission he served in as a young man), in the Missionary Training Center teaching conversational French; and working in for the missionary department in the Church Office Building.
Sister Mahaffey said one of the unique challenges senior missionary couples face is now being together more or less all the time, because one or both of them has retired from their careers. “In a way, that’s been a neat experience for us, to be able to study the scriptures together again and to have time to be able to just talk and do everything together.” She added over many years of marriage, the couple learned how to live together.
A special mission
The Hawaii Laie Mission recently celebrated its one-year anniversary. With only a tiny sliver of Oahu, Sister Mahaffey said the mission’s population is quite different from what most missions are. It hosts only eight full-time elders, 70 full-time sisters, and 110 senior missionaries. Many of them serve at the PCC, but according to her, many of the missionaries find themselves doing things they did not expect to do on their missions, like sewing and working at the plant nursery.
“The people [senior missionaries] who are at BYU–Hawaii, most of them have been educators in some form or another during their career and so, this is like an extension of their career. For us, this is the first time we’ve worked in a Visitor’s Center, and so it’s a little bit different. It’s like the gospel on speed-dial,” she said with a laugh. “You sometimes only have maybe 10 [to] 15 minutes with a guest. You have to be able to explain things and whittle down the gospel into very basic terms.”
Sister Mahaffey said in a devotional the mission recently had, their mission president, Sidney J. Bassett, quoted author Stephen Covey, saying, “The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.”
“And that’s kind of it. Keeping the Lord in focus. Of course, we study the scriptures everyday together, [and] we pray. We pray when we open this Visitor’s Center, and we pray when we close it. One of the wonderful things,” she continued, “is in the dedicatory prayer. Heber J. Grant promised that everyone who stepped on these grounds would have a sweet spirit of peace, and we get that a lot. We get people that come in and say, ‘I don’t know what it is, but it’s just so peaceful here.’”
She said, “Laie, traditionally, has been the place people would go for refuge. And I think that has not changed.” She commented the temple grounds and Visitors’ Center contained things like beautiful music being played through the speakers and the Christus statue that helped remind her how sacred of a place it was.
After serving so many missions in his life, Elder Mahaffey said the way the missions vary from one another helps him stay passionate for missionary work. He said he and his wife, in all their years, had never had the opportunity to work in a Visitors’ Center before serving in Laie. “It’s really exciting in part, because we get to work with these young sisters, and they’re phenomenal. If they’re busy, then we get to talk to people who come in. So that’s really fun, and we enjoy that.
He said although the couple did not put in a request to come to Laie, they have had many opportunities to share the gospel and use their French language skills to do so.
“To keep motivated, I think No. 1 for me is to be ready to talk to people about the gospel, just like a regular missionary. … We love serving and we’ve been super blessed. This is just an opportunity to give back. But there are days that are harder than others, and on those days, you just rely on the Savior and say, ‘Help me through this,’ and He does."
Elder Mahaffey said he was a convert to the church and came to know about the gospel when a pair of missionaries knocked on his family’s door on a hot, humid July day in Ohio.
Elder Mahaffey said his father had served in World War II and was present at Utah Beach on D-Day, when the allies began invading German-occupied France on June 6, 1944. “Friends died all around him, and he said, ‘I made a promise to God that day that if He ever wanted me to do something, that if He would let me come home and raise a family, that I would do whatever.’”
When his father met the missionaries, Elder Mahaffey said the memory came back to him, and he invited the missionaries in.
Place of peace
“The spirit of aloha is of course, ‘Hello. Goodbye,’ but it’s also the spirit of love." He too cited President Heber J. Grant’s dedicatory prayer for the temple in 1919, and how President Grant in essence said many people would come to the temple, and would not even know why but would feel peace.
“Whether it’s a nonmember or a member, they feel that. And to me, that is the spirit of aloha. The sharing of that peace and joy and that’s what President Grant promised.”
Sister Shaina Paje, a missionary from the Philippines who began her mission in February of 2023, said, “It’s been awesome. All the stuff that I’ve been struggling with is mainly adjusting and dealing with self–criticism. … Serving the people of Laie is such a wonderful blessing for me. I am so grateful I’ve been called here because I’ve been meeting people and I feel this reassurance that I’m supposed to be here. … I’m sure I will go through a lot more as I go through my mission, but right now, I think I can confidently say it’s such a blessing to be here and to be able to serve this wonderful community.”
“It’s really special,” Paje said, referring to the diverse community she got to serve in. “Even if I haven't met people from the Philippines [yet], I just feel like I’m home because of how welcoming the people are. It just shows how much diversity there is here. It’s easy to adjust because you feel welcomed and at home.”
“I love the temple model. It is so beautiful, and I love the whole Visitors’ Center. It’s just so different. Just being here and when we open the doors and take our first step here every single day, it just feels different and there’s always something new to look forward to.
Paje said she feels like the Visitors’ Center is much like the temple, only everyone can enter. “Everyone is invited, and they can feel God's love, especially the Christus right here. Right when you open those doors, you can feel His arms around you. You can feel His welcoming presence here. … Just being here brings joy,” said Paje.
In a conversation with her mission president, Paje said everyday gives her an opportunity to work on her “why,” or reason for staying on her mission. “I am gaining new reasons every single day.”
She said, “Just being able to realize I am here because I love Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ. I love them so much, and it does not feel like a sacrifice for me because I know I’m here for a reason. I know I’m a bearer of good news and I want people to know that good news. I want them to feel the joy I feel whenever I talk about Jesus Christ or Heavenly Father, and I want them to feel the love they have for them because not everyone knows that,” continued Paje.
Cahoon gestured toward the place where the intricately detailed and majestic statue of Jesus Christ, known as the Christus stood. A replica of the original statue residing in The Church of Our Lady in Denmark, it stands contrasted against a mural of the heavens and the earth being created, symbolizing the divine majesty of the Savior and His creation.
“I love that it’s at the center of the Visitors’ Center because it just represents how Christ should be at the center of our lives. I also really love the ‘God’s Plan’ exhibit. It talks about God’s plan for His families. We always have a tissue box in there because that is how strongly people can feel the spirit that they have.
“It is such a great way to feel God's love for us because we know He gives us these families that we can be together with for eternity,” Cahoon added.
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