Ancestor story: George Q. Cannon Receives the Gift of Tongues

  George Q. Cannon is Beau's Third-great Grand Uncle

The first missionaries to Hawaii assumed they were to preach to the white people. They spoke English. The missionaries spoke English. But the white people in Hawaii were a tiny minority and not interested at all. Soon the missionaries had talked to all of them. They wondered if that was it. Mission done? Do we just go home now? After all they didn't speak Hawaiian and they'd run out of English speakers. They'd done their duty, right? Who could blame them?

George Q. Cannon wanted to stay and preach to the Hawaiians. "I did not conceal my feelings; I told them that I could not go home under existing circumstances, without feeling condemned. The Lord, in my opinion, I said, would hold me accountable for not doing my duty to that people. If I were to leave them; and the people might rise up in judgement against me at some future day for not having given them the privilege of hearing the truth."

Four other elders felt the same way. Hirum Clark, the mission president, didn't want to go home, he just didn't want to stay there. He wanted the missionaries to go to the Marquesas Islands, several hundred miles south.

This was a dilemma. The president was asking them to abandon the place they were called and go to a place they hadn't been called. But an apostle of the Lord had called them to Hawaii.

Elder Cannon went to Na-lima-nui garden to pray and ask what to do. He received an answer. If he should persevere (on these islands) he would be blessed. He then had a marvelous manifestation. It was here that he talked with the Lord, heard His voice and felt His holy presence. This was such a sacred experience that he seldom made any public reference to it.

In the end, five of the ten missionaries left Hawaii. George and four others remained, but none of them spoke a word of Hawaiian, so they went up to Pu'u Kukui behind Lahaina and fasted and prayed all day that the Lord would aid them in learning the language.

After months of struggling, Elder Cannon received a miracle. He wrote about it in a letter to his Aunt Leonora. "My desire to learn to speak was very strong; it was present with me night and day and I never permitted an opportunity of talking with the natives to pass without improving it. I also tried to exercise faith before the Lord to obtain the gift of speaking the language. One evening while sitting on the mats conversing with some neighbors who had dropped in, I felt an uncommonly great desire to understand what they said. All at once I felt a peculiar sensation in my ears. I exclaimed to Elders Bigler and Keeler, who sat at the table, that I believed I had received the gift of interpretation! And it was so. From that time forward I had but little, if any, difficulty in understanding what the people said."

It got to the point when he felt it easier to express himself in Hawaiian than English. He was asked to preach all over the island. And was repeatedly told that there never has been a missionary (referring to Protestant and Catholic missionaries too) upon these islands that has been anything like as forward as he was in the language. He felt it wasn't just from his prayers but the prayers of his family back home.

George Q. Cannon: His missionary years, Lawrence Flake