“And know ye that ye shall be judges of this people, according to the judgment which I shall give unto you, which shall be just. Therefore, what manner of men ought ye to be? Verily I say unto you, even as I am.” (3 Nephi 27:27). We could describe our lives as a series of routines, habits, and patterns of behavior. To a greater or lesser degree, we all like to discover strange new things and be filled with the spirit of adventure, but none of us would enjoy complete and total randomness and chaos from one moment to the next. So we establish patterns and routines so that we don’t have to be bombarded with a complicated mental analysis every second of our day. Some of the routines we establish are conscious and deliberate, but a lot of the things we find ourselves habitually doing just sort of happen without us being fully aware. We continue to do the same things over and over even when we dislike or hate them because we don’t have a ready and viable alternative and the pain that comes from a bad habit is preferable to the chaos we would open up if we leave a chunk of our lives open to pure randomness. There is always the possibility that whatever new habit we fall into will be worse than the one we were trying to shake. When Christ asked us what manner of men ought we to be and then answered “Even as I am”, He was not trying to imply that we must magically transform ourselves into a perfect, sinless, all-powerful, infinitely compassionate Being. If we try to be even as Jesus Christ is and yet we still make mistakes, we have not failed to be “in the manner of Jesus Christ.” If we tried to copy Vincent Van Gogh’s Starry Night and yet failed to capture the beauty and majesty of the original painting, as long as we still tried to paint stars in the night sky and not an armored man riding a horse or some completely different subject manner or style of painting, then we could still say that we were painting in the manner of Vincent Van Gogh. If we were to try to paint the painting fifty times, then hopefully our fiftieth painting looks a lot closer to the original than our first attempt. It is the same with trying to be like Jesus. We aren’t going to get remotely close the first time or the four hundred and ninetieth time. But hopefully, each time that we take the pattern of Jesus Christ’s life and try to embody it with our own conduct and habits and routines, then we will get a little bit closer every time. If nothing else, we know that we will get closer to living as Jesus lived as we attempt to pattern our lives after His than we would by using any other pattern or manner of living. Christ never asked us to be Him, only to be like Him. I hope that we can all study the manner in which Christ lived and attempt to reproduce the same patterns, routines, habits, and behaviors in our own lives.
