Area Authority in Australia

Born in Papeete, Tahiti, French Polynesia, Elder Victor D. Cave, Area Authority Seventy in the Pacific Area, was helped to embrace the Church and the gospel by a friend while attending the Church College of Hawaii in 1967. Full-time missionaries had been teaching Victor about the gospel for six months, but he had not yet decided to be baptized.

One day a dorm friend met him in the hallway on the way to class. “He suddenly asked me why I had not yet joined the Church,” Elder Cave recalls. In answer to this question, Victor said he had not received a witness that it was true. His friend then challenged him to pray for a witness from the Holy Ghost.

Victor went back to his dorm room, locked the door, knelt down by his bed, and prayed. “I asked Heavenly Father if The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was His and if it was true,” Elder Cave says. “No sooner had I asked that than I was overcome with the warmest feeling, and I began to sob on my knees for at least half an hour. Those were tears of joy and peace that came from knowing I had found the only true and living church of God.” Victor was baptized at sunrise on 9 March 1968 in the Pacific Ocean.

Five years later he married Antonina Moea Ferriol. They now have five children. “The gospel brings peace into our home,” says Elder Cave. “When we live the gospel in the home, things seem to fall into place in our everyday lives and in our plans for the future. The more important matters in life take their rightful places and the less important things fade away.”

Elder Cave has enjoyed a varied professional life. He served in the French military and worked as an agent for Pan American Airways, he taught at an elementary school, and he worked as a loan officer for the Bank of Tahiti. Most recently, he has been employed by the Church, working as area translation manager in the Pacific Area Office.

“My testimony,” says Elder Cave, “is that God is at the head of His Church, Jesus is the Christ, our prayers are always answered, the Book of Mormon is true, Joseph Smith is a prophet of God, the Church is really true with a living prophet to teach us what God wants of His children today, and that living the gospel is always the best of all options.”

Elder Victor D. Cave and his wife, Antonina Moea.