I haven’t posted all week since my brief post about feeling so down after the attack on the Latter-day Saint church last Sunday. I kept wanting to, but no matter what I thought about posting, it just felt . . . meh. Like, why would I want to write anything? I just felt pretty hopeless.
Yesterday during General Conference, a multicultural choir from Utah sang a song that was new to me: Jesus is the Way:
My family all loved it, and we wondered if it was Polynesian. Today I took some time to poke around online and found out a lot about it. It was written in 1920 by Tēvita Tuliakiono, a 31-year-old man who’d been one of the first people from Tonga to join the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It’s been a favorite of Tongan Saints for years (6 of his hymns were published in the original Tongan hymnbook), but it’s finally made its way over to the English hymnbook just barely.
In Tongan, it’s “Folofola Mai ‘a Sīsū,” and there are some really fantastic versions of it out there in Tongan.
In the end, this little deep dive was really uplifting for me, and I wanted to share it right away. Often my church is portrayed as being Wonderbread white, and it was so lovely to see such a great piece of the same religion expressed through a different culture. At first I tried to fit all of this into a Facebook post, but ultimately I just had too many videos to share to make that make any sense. In any case, I hope it brings you the same upbeat spirit it brought me today.
Our Savior, Jesus Christ, has said,
“Come in, oh, come ye in through me.”
By other paths we are misled;
Through Him we are made free.
Come in through Him,
Into the fold of God.
Our Savior, Jesus, is the Way—
The Savior of the world.
2.
God’s servants, teaching in His name,
Will live His gospel strong and true,
For did not Jesus do the same?
He taught and lived it too.
Come in through Him,
Into the fold of God.
Our Savior, Jesus, is the Way—
The Savior of the world.
3.
Our Savior is the precious tree
That bears the fruit so sweet and pure.
His truth that makes us ever free
Unchanging will endure.
Come in through Him,
Into the fold of God.
Our Savior, Jesus, is the Way—
The Savior of the world.