Laie Hawaii Temple - Miracle

Standing on the front steps of the Laie Hawaii Temple, my eyes followed beautiful landscaping, all the way to the ocean.  I was reminded that the Lord, after his resurrection, visited the America's, and declared that he had other sheep to visit.  It is a reminder to me, that Christ's love is for all.  It reaches across the seas and oceans, to those who live on these and other islands.

Throughout the temple are beautiful paintings.  I wish I could now remember and describe some of them. My mind has been filled with so many beautiful images in recent days, I am relying on some of the pictures I took to remember it all.  I also loved the stairways that reminded me of levels to a waterfall.  We enjoyed attending a session with my sister and her husband.

The building of this temple, like many others, was filled with challenges.  This was the first temple built outside the continental United States.  The following story tells the miracle of how wood was obtained, and why the building was built of materials not ordinarily used on the island.

The remoteness of Hawaii posed challenges in acquiring building materials. Work on the temple was threatened by the scarcity of lumber when ships that ordinarily would go to Hawaii were diverted to Europe as the United States became embroiled in World War I. "Gathering to La'ie" describes how lumber was miraculously delivered after Ralph Woolley, the temple's builder, "found his way to the 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."

The chapter describes how a lumber ship somehow got off course on its way to Honolulu and became stuck on a reef in Laie Bay. Brother Woolley called the company that owned the lumber. Its owner told him he could have the lumber; he didn't know how they would get the ship off the reef with it on board. Missionaries and men of the community swam to the ship or went by canoes. They tied lumber together to form rafts. "With the waves pushing from the back they got the lumber on shore."

Brothers Wood, Walker and Moffat write: "The entire structure of the temple is made of steel-reinforced, poured concrete, made from crushed lava aggregate, as the lava was ready and plentiful. This included the entire edifice, floors and roofs, as well as the walls."

Brother Moffat, in an e-mail to the Church News, wrote that the Hawaiian workers questioned why the temple had to be built of concrete, since they were quite capable of making a nice wooden one like their chapel, I Hemoele, and that a concrete building was harder to make and had never been attempted around Laie. The answer given them, Brother Moffat wrote, was that the House of the Lord was meant to last long after a wooden building would have deteriorated.

http://www.ldschurchnews.com/articles/60146/Building-a-temple-in-Laie-Hawaii.html