Lotu-a-Tamaiti or Day for the Children or simply White Sunday; is celebrated annually in Samoa to this day, on the first Sunday of October every year. Preparations for THE DAY for all the Youth of Samoa were an endless process of memorising and then reciting Biblical Verses and/or Biblical Stories re-enacted in Plays in front of the whole Church on the allocated Sunday. I was 5 years old when I first stood in front of the Congregational Christian Church of Malie, the village of my birth, reciting from the Holy Bible from the Book of John 14:1 – 6 in Samoan.
During our practice sessions, we learned to sing the song “The Old Rugged Cross,” which was to stay with me forever. I sang it, mulled over it, dreamt it and wondered how and why anyone would give His life for people who were either sinners or atheists. The more I sang it, the more I thought about it and the more it stuck with me, such that my family and classmates called it “my song” because I had made them sick by singing it incessantly everywhere and anywhere within their hearing. The song/hymn was about God’s Way to prepare His son Jesus as a sin offering and gave His life in atonement for the sins of the world and in all ways that seemed to apply to me.
