Alma 37: 40

40 And it did work for them according to their faith in God;

therefore, if they had faith to believe

that God could cause that those spindles should point the way they should go,

behold, it was done;

therefore they had this miracle,

and also many other miracles wrought by the power of God,

day by day.

You can hear Nephi saying “See those little spindles? Do you believe that the Lord has the power to move such a little thing? Do you believe that He will move them so that we stay in the right path?”

Sometimes we try to take a fathom of our faith by asking ourselves whether we believe that the Lord could move a mountain, if He wanted to. This is a task of brute force, without much meaning: we don’t know why He would want to move a mountain.

This example is opposite: the Lord is moving delicate spindles. It is a small action full of meaning. Nephi is confirmed in the Lord’s love and tender mercies as he watches the spindles and recognizes that he and his family were led through “the more fertile parts of the wilderness.”(1 Ne. 16: 16)

The delicacy of the spindles creates a greater test of faith. A mountain moving might not leave room for doubt, but if the spindles looked off course, it would be easy to think that they had gotten stuck in the wrong place, that the reader was holding it the wrong way, or that it had gotten worn out, and stopped working. Especially if it looked like the spindles never changed course: e.g.“we did travel nearly eastward from that time forth.”(1 Ne. 17: 1)

“It is as easy to give heed to the word of Christ, which will point to you a straight course to eternal bliss, as it was for our fathers to give heed to this compass, which would point unto them a straight course to the promised land.”(Alma 37: 44) In what ways is our trial of faith by the word of Christ similar to the trial of faith by spindles?

Commandments are delicate: it is easy to imagine different meanings of what the Lord meant, and easy to convince ourselves that one of our interpretations is more correct than the one that the Lord is whispering in our ears (i.e. the spindles are broken).

Commandments are mostly unchanging: sometimes we are disappointed that the Lord doesn’t see fit to void one of His commandments in our special case scenario. Believing in the Lord’s delicate guidance, we might expect Him to lead us in more extreme diversions from a long-before-set-out, universally uniform path. But it is through minute variations from this path that we each find our individuality confirmed and mercies flow.