If faith allows action where knowledge cannot exist, how does one even begin? How can you have faith in anything for which you have no evidence, no way of seeing whether to use that as a basis of action or not?
Alma suggests that it is simple. One simply exercises “a particle of faith.” One does not begin with a firm faith in everything. At the very beginning, one must at least desire to believe. Perhaps the most dramatic demonstration of this lowest form of belief is the Lamanite overking’s prayer: “O God, Aaron hath told me that there is a God; and if there is a God, and if thou art God, wilt thou make thyself known unto me, and I will give away all my sins to know thee, and that I may be raised from the dead, and be saved at the last day” (Alma 22:18).
The Lamanite king doesn’t know that there is a God. He knows only that Aaron has said that there is a God. In the prayer, he starts at what must be the barest beginnings of belief: “if there is a God, and if thou art God.” What makes this tentative prayer effective is the willingness to act on that beginning faith: “I will give away all my sins to know thee.”
That is how faith begins. It begins with a small beginning and moves to greater and greater faith. While Lamoni’s father’s experience had an exceptionally rapid confirmation, for most of us it is a slower and more gentle process, as Alma explains in the next verses.