Alma’s Seed and Lehi’s Dream

As you  know, I am reading the Book of Mormon this year in light of Lehi’s Dream.  My main insight from Lehi’s dream is that it describes an iterative process where people take of the fruit repeatedly, and where many of the images in the dream are actually repetitions of the same process of coming to Christ over and over again in an upward spiral.

So it was interesting to have a belated insight about Alma’s seed in Alma 32–a chapter with obvious connections to Lehi’s dream since Alma describes the ‘fruit’ of the successful seed with references to the fruit in Lehi’s Dream.

Here is the belated insight–Alma is also talking about an iterative repeated process.  That’s evident for two reasons.  First, he says that when you cease to have faith that the seed is good because you know it is, you still need to nourish the ‘tree.’  Second, in Alma 32:34, when someone reaches a stage of knowledge he doesn’t say that their faith goes away.  He says it becomes dormant, i.e., waiting for the next time you need it.  Dormant and dead and done are not the same thing.