As A Grain of Mustard

Christ invites us to have faith “as a grain of mustard.” He didn’t say apple seed or peach pit or avocado seed. He said mustard seed. Sometimes when we’re just starting out, we want to come out with guns blazing. We don’t want to fiddle with little tiny mustard seeds you can’t hardly see. We want like a nice big mango seed - something that can fit in the palm of your hands. Something you wouldn’t look silly trying to plant. Who has time for dinky little mustard seeds? But that’s the point. God wants us to start small. No, smaller than that. Smaller than that. There you go. The mustard seed isn’t going to stay that size. It’s going to grow and grow and grow, but you can’t have a nice, luscious mustard plant if you don’t start with a tiny little seed. When Nephi was commanded to build a boat, he didn’t start with some giant, coconut-sized belief. He didn’t say, Lord, remember when you dropped off that ball of curious workmanship at my father’s tent? Well, how about dropping a big bag of tools and a Dummy’s Guide to Ship-Building at my tent? No, Nephi started with mustard seed-size faith. He was in the middle of a big desert full of dirt and rocks. He didn’t ask God for the unbelievable miracle of showing him where a mostly completed ship was. He asked God which rocks had enough metal in them to make tools out of, because he was in a place full of rocks so it wasn’t beyond belief that some of those rocks might be useful. A mustard seed is so small that you could easily lose it, or step on it, or forget where you put it and never find it again. That’s how a lot of our beliefs and first tiny acts of faith start out. We try something and it doesn’t work and we stop. Then we try something else. We might think these tiny little acts of faith don’t count. We might think that half-heartedly inviting a neighbor to our niece’s blessing, or smiling at a stranger on the subway, or grudgingly picking up a friend from the airport, or yanking the scriptures open, hurriedly reading one verse and then throwing them down before rushing out the door doesn’t count. It’s so small that it’s not worth mentioning or thinking about. But if we just keep chucking out those tiny little mustard seeds, even if some of them get eaten up by birds or fall among stones or thorns and weeds, that’s OK. Because some of those seeds are going to fall in good soil and before we know it, all of those tiny little acts of faith are going to result in us having a great big field full to bursting with mustard plants.