I’ve been to the Hawaiian islands more times than I can count. Each visit confirms what my first one whispered: this place is enchanted. Not in a postcard sense, but in that deeper way where land, history, and spirit braid together. This holiday season I’m here again with my family—not to “do Christmas,” but almost the opposite: to step away from how a materialistic world has turned the remembrance of Christ’s birth into a shopping holiday, pinned to a date on which He almost certainly was not born. We’re here to mark my daughter’s senior year of high school, my wife’s birthday, and the quiet, humbling blessings that come from stumbling, again and again, into a life shaped by following God’s lead rather than my own agenda.
And there’s another reason this trip feels layered with meaning: I was born in 1959, the year both Alaska and Hawaii entered the Union. Alaska attained statehood while I was still in the womb, Hawaii shortly after my birth. Those two distant states, 49 and 50, have framed my life more than I realized for a long time.
Alaska, where I later lived in a tent in 20-below weather to finish high school, shaped my identity through hardship. That canvas and ice, now firmly in my past, symbolize the testing ground of my youth: survival, isolation, the stripping away of illusion. Hawaii, by contrast, has come to represent my hope and faith and future—a place of restoration, family, and spiritual integration. Between those two poles—frozen trial and warm promise—my story, and America’s, intersect.
But this isn’t really a travelogue. I want to talk about why Hawaii matters—historically, spiritually, and symbolically—especially as America’s 50th state.
A brief history of Hawaii: from kingdom to 50th state
Long before it was a tourist destination or a military outpost, Hawaii was a sovereign Polynesian kingdom with a rich, cohesive culture. Its people navigated the vast Pacific using stars, swells, and an intimacy with creation that modern GPS can only mimic, not replace. There was a kapu system—sacred taboos that ordered life—and a monarchy that, despite its flaws, held together a distinct civilization at the crossroads of East and West.
Then came the modern era. Whalers, missionaries, sugar barons. Disease, demographic collapse, and economic dependency. An American-backed coup in 1893 overthrew Queen Liliʻuokalani. Annexation followed in 1898, statehood not until 1959. That long arc—kingdom, occupation, annexation, territory, state—still reverberates in Hawaiian identity and politics today.
From one angle, Hawaii’s story is a tragedy of empire and exploitation. From another, it is a unique, if painful, experiment in integration: Can a once-sovereign island nation become part of a continental federal republic without losing its soul? Can America absorb such difference without demanding total assimilation?
It’s here that the number “50” starts to glow with a different kind of meaning.
The Jubilee pattern: why 50 matters
In the Hebrew Scriptures, 50 is not just another number. It is the number of Jubilee.
Every seventh year, Israel was commanded to let the land rest—a sabbatical year. Seven of those seven-year cycles (7 x 7 = 49) culminated in the 50th year, the Jubilee (Leviticus 25). In that year:
- Debts were forgiven
- Land returned to ancestral families
- Slaves were set free
- The economic and social playing field was reset
It was a radical acknowledgment that the land ultimately belongs to God, not to human title systems, and that any structure of ownership or power that drifts too far from justice must be periodically reset to prevent permanent underclasses and entrenched privilege.
In that pattern, 49 is the fullness of a cycle—7 times 7, completeness squared. Fifty is the overflow beyond completion, the divine reset that says, “Now start again—differently.”
Applied symbolically, 50 stands for:
- Release from bondage
- Restoration of rightful relationships
- A new beginning that honors both justice and mercy
Is it a coincidence that Hawaii is our 50th state, and that I arrived the same year? Maybe. But numbers, in a biblical worldview, are often both arithmetic and archetype. They point. And when I lay my own story alongside Alaska (49) and Hawaii (50), the pattern becomes hard to ignore.
Alaska and Hawaii: 49 and 50 on the edge of the map
Before Hawaii came Alaska, the 49th state—7 x 7. A completion of sorts.
Alaska is not an abstraction to me. It’s the place where, as a teenager, I lived in a tent in 20-below weather to finish high school. It was harsh, raw, and purifying. Alaska taught me that survival requires humility, grit, and community. Nature is not impressed by our illusions of control. Out there, you learn quickly whether your faith is theoretical or real.
Those frozen nights in that tent felt like exile, but also like preparation. In People of the Sign I trace how that season forged a capacity to endure harsh conditions—physical, emotional, and spiritual. Later, when divorce shattered my family of origin and left a permanent mark on my soul, that same endurance became both a wound and a resource: I knew how to survive, but I was still learning how to heal.
Alaska sits atop the continent like a crown of wilderness—vast, resource-rich, strategically critical, but spiritually a kind of frontier. When it became the 49th state in 1959, it symbolized the completion of one phase of American expansion: from Atlantic to Pacific to Arctic, a land-based empire of sorts, stitched together under one flag.
Then came Hawaii: distant, oceanic, a former kingdom in the middle of the Pacific. If Alaska is ice and isolation, Hawaii is water and connection. It is the hinge between East and West, North and South—a meeting place of cultures from Asia, the Americas, and Polynesia.
49: the fullness of expansion.
50: the invitation to Jubilee—reconsideration, restoration, and a different kind of unity.
And for me personally, 49 looks like that tent in the snow; 50 looks like standing on a Hawaiian beach with my wife and children, not just surviving, but consciously building the kind of family life I never had.
A Feast of Tabernacles in Hawaii: tents, families, and the Word
That personal Jubilee theme touched Hawaii long before I consciously connected the numbers. In People of the Sign I describe my last Feast of Tabernacles as a paid minister in the Worldwide Church of God. That Feast took place in Hawaii—here, in this “50th state” that I now see as symbolizing hope and restoration.
The Feast of Tabernacles is, among other things, a season of dwelling in temporary shelters—tents, booths—remembering Israel’s wilderness wanderings. It is a festival of both fragility and promise: you step out of permanent structures to remember that your true security is in God, not brick and mortar.
How fitting that my last Feast as a WCG minister unfolded here. I came to that Feast with a heavy history: a childhood scarred by divorce, a ministry often overshadowed by institutional agendas, and a burning desire that families not fracture the way mine did. That desire led me to roll out intergenerational Bible studies at that Hawaiian Feast—deliberately designed to bring parents and children together around the Word of God.
Instead of shuttling kids off to youth programs while adults did “serious” study, we invited whole families to sit together, to read, learn, and talk as one unit. For me, this was not just pedagogy; it was prophecy. The divorce that shattered and shaped me had convinced me that if God’s Word didn’t land in the family, across generations, then all our doctrines and sermons were missing the mark.
Standing here now, years later, with my own daughter on the verge of adulthood and my wife by my side, I see a continuity between that Feast and this moment:
- Alaska’s tent taught me to endure
- My parents’ divorce taught me what breaks a family
- That Feast of Tabernacles in Hawaii taught me to fight for intergenerational wholeness
- This trip to Hawaii, as a father and husband, lets me taste the fruit of that fight
The same islands that hosted my last Feast as a WCG minister now host quiet, unscripted “feasts” of the Spirit as we talk, walk, laugh, and sometimes cry together as a family. It’s not perfect. But it is real. And it feels like a taste of Jubilee.
America as “Great Republic of the West” and the Baha’i horizon
In the Baha’i writings, America is described as the “Great Republic of the West,” prophesied to play a leading role in ushering in the “Most Great Peace.” Not because we are morally superior—our record on slavery, indigenous peoples, empire, and economic exploitation proves otherwise—but because our model contains seeds of something the world desperately needs.
Consider what our federal system actually is:
A union of semi-sovereign states—diverse in history, economy, culture—bound together in a higher covenant. Each retains identity and agency, yet all are submitted to a shared constitutional order. It is, in embryonic form, a kind of “United Nations under God”—not yet fully faithful to that vision, but structurally suggestive of where humanity must eventually go: cooperation among distinct peoples, without erasing difference, under a higher law.
Hawaii’s admission tested and expanded that model. This was not just another contiguous territory like a Colorado or a Dakota. It was:
- A non-contiguous island chain
- With its own prior nationhood and monarchy
- With a population already deeply mixed—Asian, Polynesian, European, and more
- With profound spiritual traditions tied to land and sea
To admit Hawaii was to say, however imperfectly, “Our union is not defined only by geography or European ancestry. It can encompass an island kingdom with a different origin story.”
In Baha’i terms, each step America takes toward a genuinely inclusive, justice-oriented federal union is a rehearsal for the larger world federation humanity will one day need. Our failures are many. Our promise remains.
Jubilee, Hawaii, and America’s unfinished calling
So what does it mean that Hawaii is our 50th state in light of the Jubilee pattern?
At minimum, it suggests that the “capstone” of our union is a place whose history cries out for precisely what Jubilee commands:
- Restoration – of language, culture, sacred sites, and economic dignity for Native Hawaiians
- Release – from exploitative land arrangements, predatory development, and the reduction of a living culture to a tourist brand
- Reconciliation – between the story of the American republic and the story of the Hawaiian kingdom, in truth, not in denial
If 49 (Alaska) marks the end of expansion, 50 (Hawaii) can mark the beginning of reckoning: Can America become not just bigger, but better—more aligned with the law of Jubilee that runs like a river through Scripture and through the marrow of real justice?
From the vantage point of the Baha’i vision, the “Most Great Peace” is not a sentimental ceasefire. It is a just, spiritually grounded world order in which nations relate to one another as the states in our union are meant to relate: equal, cooperative, diverse, and committed to the common good. Our own union is, at best, a workshop for that destiny.
Hawaii’s presence in the union, with its unique wounds and gifts, may be God’s way of forcing that workshop to confront issues we would otherwise ignore: colonialism, indigeneity, land, and the meaning of sovereignty under a higher law.
The Kingdom of God and a federal pattern
The “kingdom of God on earth” is not about a theocracy in which one relition becomes dominant, seizes the levers of power, and bends all others to its will. It is about God’s will—justice, mercy, humility, unity—being written into the structures by which we actually live.
Our federal union at its best is an image of this:
- Multiple identities, one covenant
- Local autonomy, universal rights
- Diversity of laws and customs, unity under higher principles
And America is not merely a European project. Representatives of every identity on earth have gathered here—by choice or by force—and are learning, painfully, to live together, build together, and argue under a constitution that aspires, however falteringly, to justice for all.
In that sense, the United States is a spiritual laboratory. Hawaii and Alaska, 49 and 50, are not marginal additions but essential test cases at the edges of our map. They ask whether our professed ideals can embrace the frozen frontier and the tropical kingdom, the hunter and the surfer, igloos and ahupuaʻa, on terms that reflect both truth and grace.
Standing on the shore
As I stand on these shores with my family—marking my wife’s birthday, watching my daughter edge into her own adult story, remembering the boy in the Alaskan tent and the young minister at the Feast of Tabernacles here years ago—I feel keenly that none of this is random.
In this context my story looks like this. A child born in 1959, the year of Alaska and Hawaii’s statehood, grows up between those symbolic poles. He learns hardship under the number 49—7 times 7, the fullness of testing. He catches a glimpse of family healing and intergenerational faith under the sign of 50, the number of Jubilee.
Between those two numbers—49 and 50, ice and fire, wilderness and surf—stretches not just my personal journey, but a question for America itself:
Will we treat Hawaii as a vacation backdrop, or as a prophetic mirror?
Will we see “50” as a trivia fact, or as a Jubilee summons—for our nation, and for our families?
The Baha’i writings promise that despite our failures, this Great Republic of the West has a part to play in leading humanity toward the Most Great Peace. Whether we fulfill that promise depends on whether we learn to live our federal ideal as a spiritual covenant, not just a legal arrangement—and whether, in our homes, we live our faith intergenerationally, not just individually.
Hawaii, the 50th state, may be one of God’s gentlest and sharpest reminders of what that covenant requires.
As you think about your own story, does it feel more like Alaska right now—hardship and testing—or more like Hawaii—restoration and hope? And can you lean into the future, with gratitude, finding the positive in what the past represents and has delivered for you?
