Being Like A Perfect Person

"Therefore, what manner of men ought ye to be? Verily I say unto you, even as I am." (3 Nephi 27:27). I want to focus on the word manner. What manner of men and women ought we to be? The kind of person that we should be is someone like Christ. Christ does not want us to try to be perfect people. Well, He does, but He recognizes that this is virtually impossible given the weaknesses and frailties of the flesh and the fallen world we live in. Rather, He wants us to be like a perfect person. Now that may just seem like semantic judo, but it's actually an important distinction. There's a difference between trying to be a perfect person and trying to be like a perfect person. When playing a song on the piano, a perfect person would play the whole piece through without stopping because they wouldn't make any mistakes. If we are not skilled enough to play a whole song without any mistakes, we can nevertheless play the song like a perfect person would, i.e. without stopping. We just play through the mistakes and move on. Christ gave us a pattern on how to live our life. We can try to follow that pattern. Our execution of that pattern will not be as flawless as Christ's was, but we can try to get it as close to the original as we possibly can. We are supposed to try to be like Christ, not try to be Christ. We're supposed to be like a perfect person, not actually be a perfect person. God knows that perfection is out of reach, but we can do our best to live our life like a perfect person would. A perfect person doesn't spend any time dwelling on their mistakes or wallowing in their sins because they don't sin or make mistakes. We can do our best to recognize the error of our ways as fast as we can and then repent and move on, just like we can play through our mistakes and keep playing the song. Let us do our best to be like a perfect person, and not beat ourselves up that we never actually achieve perfection.