“Therefore, as the soul could never die, and the fall had brought upon all mankind a spiritual death as well as a temporal, that is, they were cut off from the presence of the Lord, it was expedient that mankind should be reclaimed from this spiritual death.” (Alma 42:9). The Savior compared the hearts of men and women to different kinds of soil in which the word of God might be planted to grow and multiply. But what happens if that soil is underwater? Reclamation is the process of converting land that is underwater into dry ground. Many parts of coastal cities are built on reclaimed land that used to be a part of the ocean floor or seabed. Many agricultural breadbaskets were mosquito-infested swampland two hundred years ago. Over one fourth of the entirety of the Netherlands is reclaimed land. One could argue that a real low point in the experiment of God giving His children the moral agency to act for themselves was during the flood that covered the entire face of the Earth. It may have been a symbol for the spiritual death of an entire society that had so thoroughly cut itself off from their Heavenly Father that there was nowhere in all of the land where even one small seed of the Word of God could be planted and have a hope to grow. The hearts of men had become so flooded with wickedness and immorality that there was not one patch of dry soil anywhere. But after the symbolic and then literal flood, righteous men and women, guided by the Spirit and filled with the power of Christ’s Atonement, began the greatest reclamation project ever undertaken, a project that is still underway to this day. If we have allowed the soil of our hearts to be flooded by evil choices and bad habits and diabolical influences, then we have an opportunity to work with our Savior to reclaim our hearts and give place once more for the word of God to be planted on the good, dry soil of our hearts. And once we have begun to reclaim our own souls, then we can with meekness and gentleness and love unfeigned help to reclaim the hearts of our friends and families and neighbors.
