My family's connection to the South Pacific reaches back generations. My great-grandparents served as mission presidents in Samoa, where my grandfather was born. Years later, my parents sailed through the South Pacific and stopped in Samoa to see the place where my mother's father had been born. They fell in love with the islands and stayed for many years. I eventually joined them there, and it was in Samoa that my husband and I were married.

Our own journey later brought us to Vanuatu—a place that would become deeply woven into our family.

Nearly eighteen years ago, while visiting Erromango, a local artist and keeper of the island's stories shared with us an oral and visual tradition of Christ visiting the Isles of the Sea. It became one of those treasured stories our family carried home with us.

Years later, our youngest son—Ni-Vanuatu, born on Efate with family from Tanna—asked me to paint it.

A Story Generations in the Making

Erromango was in my heart as I painted—the people, the traditional dress, and the beautiful patterns of nemasitse barkcloth. From those details, I imagined something larger: the peoples of the Isles of the Sea, generations gathered along the shore, young and old, with a beautiful mother figure among them, all turning toward the Savior.

And then there was the light.

There is a light in Vanuatu I have never forgotten—the way it pours across the ocean and dances on the water. As I painted, I kept imagining that shoreline flooded with light, and what it might feel like to be standing there—

and see the Savior coming.

More than anything, I hope someone standing before this painting feels that our Heavenly Parents know them personally.

No matter what time or place we live in, who we are, or what we have been through—

we are not forgotten.

Our Savior has His eye upon us.

He will come to us.
He cares.

While the painting was still taking shape, my son was sitting with his grandmother, reading journals she had written nearly forty years earlier while living in Samoa. They came across an entry she herself didn't even remember writing.

She had written of a powerful desire to paint Christ coming to the people of the Isles of the Sea.

It was a painting she never painted.

When I read her words, I felt the Spirit so strongly. A story carried home from Vanuatu, words my mother had written and forgotten decades earlier, and now a request from my son—whose own roots reach back through generations in the Isles of the Sea—had somehow all found their way to the same canvas.

It felt as though a thread had been quietly carried through generations.

For months, the painting hung in our home as I continued to work on it. When it was finally finished, something unexpected began happening.

One by one, my children would stand before it and say some version of the same thing:

“Mom, I don't think this painting is supposed to stay here.”

Others felt it too. More than once, someone said it seemed as though it belonged in a temple.

So when Christ Visiting the Isles of the Sea was eventually selected for the Port Vila Vanuatu Temple project, to hang in the ancillary building serving the temple complex, there was a quiet sense that this was where it had been headed all along.

The painting was going home.

We recently delivered the original to Salt Lake City, where it will be framed and prepared for its journey across the Pacific. Soon it will hang only minutes from the place our family once called home.