Molten Rock
Thy gentleness hath made me great…
Psalm 18:35
At age fourteen, Joseph F. Smith lost his mother. His father, Hyrum, had been martyred years earlier. As the oldest child, Joseph felt the burden of watching over his family. Fiercely loyal and quick-tempered, he was especially devoted to his younger siblings. One day at school, a teacher threatened to strike his little sister. Joseph warned him not to. The teacher turned on Joseph instead. “He started for me,” Joseph later recalled, “but it didn’t work out the way he expected.” Joseph thrashed him—and was expelled.
Brigham Young and other Church leaders, aware of Joseph’s fiery nature and recent troubles, felt that “his energy should be channeled in another direction.” So at age fifteen, Joseph was called to serve a mission in the Hawaiian Islands.
He arrived in Honolulu in the fall of 1854 and was sent alone to the remote upcountry of Kula, Maui. This was no paradise of leisure. The land was dry, the people poor, and their only language was Hawaiian. Joseph lived as they did—barefoot, hungry, sleeping on mats.
Soon after his arrival, illness struck. A humble Hawaiian couple took him in. The wife, Ma Mahuhii, nursed him when he could not rise, fed him with what little they had, and gave him the quiet devotion of a mother. Her care restored his health—and his will to serve. For the rest of his life, he called her “Mama.”
While convalescing, Joseph devoted himself to studying the language, recalling Elder Parley P. Pratt’s promise that he would master it through “faith and study.” Within one hundred days, he could preach and teach fluently.
On another occasion, while staying with a couple in Wailuku, something frightening occurred. As Joseph was studying the scriptures, the woman of the house was suddenly seized by an unseen force, her body twisting violently. Her husband stood paralyzed—“trembling like a leaf in the wind,” Joseph later wrote. At first overwhelmed himself, Joseph prayed and felt the Spirit come upon him with power. He rebuked the evil spirit, and the woman collapsed, as if dead. Her husband began to howl and wail, but Joseph rebuked him too, and the house fell silent. Then Joseph returned to his studies in peace.
Transferred to the Big Island, he soon witnessed one of the great volcanic events of the nineteenth century. On August 11, 1855, Mauna Loa began to erupt, sending molten rock in vast, unyielding flows toward Hilo. The lava advanced for months, devouring everything in its path. Joseph, like the townspeople, must have felt the helpless awe of watching an unstoppable force approach. Yet, in a testament to the providential hand of God, the lava ultimately stopped short of the town, leaving behind an immense plain of cooled black stone. Joseph would later walk barefoot across that hardened field.
He served in the islands nearly four years.
In 1915, fifty-seven years after first setting foot in Hawai‘i, Joseph F. Smith returned as president of the Church. The Saints crowded the Honolulu wharf, draping him with leis. Amid the celebration, a thin voice rose: “Iosepa… Iosepa!” An old, blind woman, too frail to push forward, stood holding a small bunch of bananas—her only offering. It was Ma Mahuhii.
Joseph pressed through the crowd, tears in his eyes. “Mama, Mama,” he said, embracing her. “My dear old Mama”. Turning to a companion, he exclaimed, “She nursed me when I was a boy! I was sick and without anyone to care for me. She took me in and was a mother to me.”
Joseph F. Smith could not have known then that he was entering the final three years of his life. Yet as he stood on what was sacred ground to him, the memory of Mauna Loa’s lava—destructive, but ultimately diverted from Hilo—must have echoed the path of his own soul. His youthful temper, and the grief that once threatened to consume him, had not destroyed him. Instead, in those distant islands, God had tempered his spirit into a force of faith and placed him under the care of a new mother—a reflection of His own boundless love.
Ultimately, his tearful reunion with Ma Mahuhii was more than a homecoming; it was a final earthly embrace from the woman who had saved him, and a foreshadowing of the welcome he would soon receive from his own Maker.