“Now, we will compare the word unto a seed. Now, if ye give place, that a seed may be planted in your heart, behold, if it be a true seed, or a good seed, if ye do not cast it out by your unbelief, that ye will resist the Spirit of the Lord, behold, it will begin to swell within your breasts; and when you feel these swelling motions, ye will begin to say within yourselves—It must needs be that this is a good seed, or that the word is good, for it beginneth to enlarge my soul; yea, it beginneth to enlighten my understanding, yea, it beginneth to be delicious to me.” (Alma 32:28). We are told over and over again that faith is like a little seed. One of the dangers of comparing faith to a seed is that we might be tempted to pin our conception of all of our faith to a single seed. Perhaps we imagine a mustard plant or a grape vine or an apple tree, but we assume that all of our faith lives or dies by that one plant. But generally when the Lord compares His work to plants and agriculture, He refers less often to single plants and much more frequently to vineyards and fields all white and ready to harvest. We need not think of our faith as some fussy and delicately fragile bonsai tree upon which we must lavish all of our time and energy and attention. It's a beautiful idea but if our faith is anchored on a single plant, however exquisitely manicured and pampered, then if the insidious rot of doubt creeps into our one plant and poisons it, then we will have nothing left. However, if we were instead to plant a great big field with all kinds of seeds, then if we lose some, even many, of our plants to fire or famine or flood, then we are still likely to weather the storms and still have at least some plants to show for it. We can't afford to put all of our hopes on just one seed. We need to go out and plant a bunch of seeds and start watching to see which ones will grow. If they're good seeds, then they'll grow. If they're not good seeds, then we need to stop wasting our time on those and move on to the next batch. We can't always know ahead of time which seeds are going to be good and which are going to be bad. That's why it's called faith. We just have to keep on planting seed after seed. Some of the things that we try will work out and some won't. Moses planted ten different seeds before he finally got the Pharaoh to let his people go. Even Jesus had only eleven of the twelve seeds He planted turn out to be good and bear fruit. A crucial element of faith is trying out things that have no guarantee of success and maybe even have a high probability of failure but trying them out anyway, because we never know which seeds are going to bear fruit. And then the second part is learning to recognize if you've ended up with a good seed or a bad seed and if it is a bad seed, having the wisdom and the courage to uproot the unfruitful product of a bad seed and move on to the next seed. If you plant ninety-nine bad seeds and one good seed, but that hundredth seed brings forth a hundredfold, then all of the failure from those bad seeds will in the end have been worth it. I hope we never stop planting our seeds of faith so that we can always have a great big field that is white, all ready to harvest.
