This blog will never be a popular Come Follow Me site. What people understandably want is a site that gives them cool insights when they are reading the material. But I get most of my insights in Sunday School when we are discussing the lessons from the last two weeks, or even in the days after when I am thinking about the Sunday School conversation. I believe that there is an intensification of the available spiritual insight as more and more of the Saints simultaneously turn their attention to a subject.

So here goes, thoughts and comments on the part of the Book of Mormon you are no longer reading.

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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.

Actually, the reign of the judges did, title deliberately eyecatching.

I continue to reel from my realization this time through the Book of Mormon that switching from the kingship to the judgeship was a disaster that resulted in stacks of corpses year after year after year.  (Which is not the same as saying it was wrong, Mosiah was in a genuinely tough spot and perhaps there was a window for a better response that key people chose not to take.)  But setting aside any moral judgment it was just a disaster in fact and a case could be made that the entire destruction of the Nephite people hundreds of years later was just the result of the judgeship (it’s not a slam dunk case because of the supervening Savior, but the argument would be something like Judges–>Gadiantons–>rot of Nephite culture that revived after the Savior’s influence wore off.  I’ll sit down to think about it more seriously at some point.)

Anyhow, these were my thoughts in the dark.  It’s 3 AM and I’m lying in the dark trying to solve the problems of a foreign culture 20 centuries in the past.  What my brain is telling me is that what the reign of the judges really needed was a king.  It was an experimental system and it really needed someone running the experiment.  The judge couldn’t be that person because the judge was a product of the system.  It needed Eternal Mosiah.

I am impressed with how much truth Alma 32:32 packs into a simple sentence.

Therefore, if a seed groweth it is good, but if it groweth not, behold it is not good, therefore it is cast away.

There’s nothing in there about whether the seed is unblemished or whether it might need some pruning when it grows, or suffer some partial dieback at one point.  Nothing at all.  If it grows, its good.

Perfection is the destination, not the journey.  Enjoy the journey.