Part 2 Seven Parables For A Plastic Soul

Where scripture becomes seed, paradox becomes doorway, and story becomes surgery for the soul.
Seven weeks. Seven lessons. One nervous system reborn.

Part 2: The Soil - Pondering, Labor, and Neuroplasticity

We sometimes imagine spiritual understanding as lightning, sudden brilliance, a voice from heaven, truth delivered complete. Revelation can come like that, but most often it does not. More often it arrives like sunrise, barely noticeable at first, until one day the room is full of light and you no longer remember when the darkness left.

If a story changes the heart by entering through the senses, scripture transforms by returning again and again, not skimming but sitting, the way steady water erodes stone through sheer repetition.

Neuroscience offers a language for this slow dawn. The brain is plastic, which means it can change, but it is not passive. We become what we repeatedly attend to.

Every time you read a passage, neurons fire. If you read it again tomorrow, the same pathway lights up. Read it again a week later, and the trail thickens. Continue over years, and it becomes a highway.

Long term memory is powerfully strengthened by the combination of repetition, focused attention, and emotional engagement. Scanning scripture without pondering builds very little. But wrestling, even over a single verse, reshapes us.

Scripture is not just information. It is also formation.

God could have delivered glory like data, but instead He gave us pages, ink, and symbols to labor over. In that labor, something rewires. Something grows.

When the mind meets truth through image and symbol, the brain does not just record it. It simulates it. A "hardened heart" briefly activates tactile regions as if hardness could be felt. "Living water" stirs thirst circuits. "My yoke is easy" engages neurons related to tension and relief. God speaks so the soul can feel truth, not only hear it.

Joseph Smith did not casually browse the Bible. He labored over the scriptures, trying to know what God would have him do. That labor was not a side note. It was the work that opened the heavens.

In his own words from Liberty Jail:

"The things of God are of deep import; and time, and experience, and careful and ponderous and solemn thoughts can only find them out. Thy mind, O man, if thou wilt lead a soul unto salvation, must stretch as high as the utmost heavens, and search into and contemplate the lowest considerations of the darkest abyss."

Joseph wrestled until the scripture wrestled back.

Neural pathways thickened. Faith strengthened. Desire deepened until action followed. Scripture had become more than words on paper, they became a living seed.

Why God makes truth something we must seek

We want answers. God wants seekers.

A child can memorize verses. A disciple is invited to absorb them. Knowledge can be written into a notebook. Wisdom has to be carved into the soul.

There are three modes of engaging scripture:

Reading (passing the eyes over text)
Study (grasping meaning with the mind)
Meditation or pondering (letting meaning sink into heart and body)

Only the third rewires desire.

That carving happens slowly, through habits like these:

chewing on a verse long after we close the page
returning when we do not yet understand it
listening without demanding an immediate conclusion
letting questions soften us instead of harden us
noticing new meaning when life has made us able to bear it

Neuroplasticity tells us that repetition changes neural structure. Scripture tells us that pondering changes spiritual structure.

Together they reveal one truth: what we return to becomes what we are.

Why God teaches line upon line

We sometimes think of "line upon line" as God handing out spiritual facts in small portions. It is more than that.

It is God growing our capacity.

God Himself warns against the spirit that says, “We have enough.” In the Covenant of Christ He promises to give teaching “line upon line, a little here and a little there,” but only to those who remain willing to receive. Those who listen to His counsel gain wisdom, and “I’ll give more to those who receive; but from those who say we have enough, even what they have will be taken away.” Revelation grows where there is humility. It closes where certainty tries to seal the door.

If deep revelation came when our spiritual mind was still tender and unformed, it might break us. Truth can be like new wine that bursts an old bottle. Grace waits while a new vessel is made.

And that vessel is formed through practice:

Read.

Think.

Pray.

Repeat.

Each return lays another thread of myelin on the pathway, another ring on the tree of the soul. Understanding is not only a moment. It is a becoming.

Lightning changes a landscape in an instant. Sunrise changes it forever simply by returning. Most revelation is sunrise.

What pondering does that reading alone cannot

Reading is input. Pondering is integration.

Reading tells you what the text says. Pondering allows it to speak back.

Reading passes through the mind. Pondering lets it sink down into the heart.

Neuroscientists call this consolidation, the process where a fragile short term trace becomes a stable long term network. Spiritually, this is meditation. It is why the Psalms speak of meditating day and night, why Nephi sat pondering, why Joseph did not rush.

Revelation often waits behind the second or third reading, as if God hides treasure beneath the soil to reward those who continue digging. He wants partners, not spectators.

A quiet insight from neuroscience

After study comes rest. In sleep, the brain replays, strengthens, and relocates memory from hippocampus to cortex. Scripture often transforms us more in the night than in the moment we read it. Sabbath is not absence of growth, but the womb of it.

This rhythm of slow return is not uniquely Christian. It is human and ancient.

Jewish (Mishnah)

“Turn it and turn it again, for everything is in it.”

Islamic Sufi (dhikr tradition)

“Repeat the Name until the heart remembers what the tongue is saying.”

Hindu (Upanishadic / Advaita)

“Read little. Sit much. Let it sink.”

Hindu (Bhagavad Gītā)

“Little by little, through patience and repeated effort, the mind will become stilled in the Self.”

Buddhist (Theravāda)

“Whatever is well contemplated and repeated often becomes the inclination of the mind.”

Buddhist (Zen)

“Sit until the breath becomes the teaching and the teaching becomes the breath.”

Taoist (Dao De Jing)

“Close the mouth, shut the doors of the senses… soften the glare, untie the knots. This is called the mysterious sameness.”

Taoist (Zhuangzi)

“The perfect man uses his mind like a mirror — going after nothing, welcoming nothing, responding but not storing.”

Sikh

“By pondering the Name again and again, the heart-lotus blossoms.”

Baha’i

“The source of all learning is the knowledge of God, and this cannot be attained save through continual remembrance.”

Different temples, same soil. It carries the same heartbeat: take in a little → dwell deeply → repeat → become.

When scripture becomes instinct

Over time, as these pathways strengthen, something beautiful happens.

You no longer simply recall the verse. You respond from it.

You forgive, not only because you remembered a commandment, but because compassion has become your reflex. You love enemies, not by gritting your teeth, but because Christ has been written into your nervous system.

This is the promise of the New Covenant:

"I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people."

Jeremiah 12:9

Not written only on stone. Not only in external memory. Written into the very mind and body.

Scripture fulfilled through neuroplasticity, grace working through repetition, heaven and biology meeting in a single life.

In summary

In this part we have seen that:

the brain rewires through repetition, focused attention, and emotional engagement
scripture is designed for returning, not rushing
pondering transforms information into revelation
God gives truth "line upon line" because our capacity must grow with what we are given
over time, the teachings of Christ can become reflex rather than rule

Discipleship is not achieved in a single moment. It is grown, like seed to sprout, sprout to tree.

God is patient. We are invited to learn that patience with Him, and with ourselves.

"Sleeping At Last - North" carries a feeling of return, a quiet kind of belonging that grows over time. It mirrors how scripture works on us, not all at once, but in layers.

Practice for the reader

Tonight or tomorrow morning, choose one short passage of scripture. Not a full chapter. Just a few sentences. Read them slowly. Then close the book and sit still. Notice what rises. Return to the same words later in the day or the next day. Write down what changed in how you saw them.

Watch how the seed behaves in new soil.
What verse has been waiting for your second look?

Coming in Part Three: The Thorn

We will explore why God often teaches through tension rather than certainty, and how staying inside contradiction, instead of rushing out of it, can enlarge the soul and deepen revelation.

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