“Condemn me not because of mine imperfection, neither my father, because of his imperfection, neither them who have written before him; but rather give thanks unto God that he hath made manifest unto you our imperfections, that ye may learn to be more wise than we have been.” (Mormon 9:31). We live in a culture that is quick to condemn others for their real or imagined imperfections. Condemn is an interesting word, etymologically speaking. The root of the word comes from the Latin damnare which is the same root found for the word damn, which is often used as a synonym of condemn. But the prefix, con-, means jointly, together, with. So, in essence, when we are condemning someone or something, we are damning ourselves jointly together with the person or object that we wish to condemn. And this isn't just some Karmic recoil that casts a metaphysical pall on our soul. It has been said that those who fail to learn from the past are condemned to repeat it. But I would take it one step farther. Those who condemn the past are damned twice over. If we condemn others because they failed to perfectly confront the challenges they faced, we are depriving ourselves of any possible lessons or insights that we might have gleaned from studying and trying to understand how and why they failed. That means when similar circumstances bear down on us, instead of facing the challenge fully prepared with the hard won wisdom of those who have gone before us, we will inevitably crumble and collapse, making the same exact foolish errors of those who have gone before. Sometimes we get so busy looking down our noses as we stand atop the pile of our flawed and broken predecessors that we don't even see it coming when the same enemy that beat them down comes for us. We should be grateful whenever an imperfection is made manifest, either in ourselves or in those we admire or in those we despise. God does not let all of our imperfections become manifest merely to make all of us feel self-conscious and deplorable. He wants us all to learn wisdom from each other's failures and mistakes and weaknesses. We should be grateful when our favorite hero shows some major flaw, because now we can learn wisdom from their mistakes rather than following in their footsteps and being damned together with them. Condemning means being damned together. We don't want to be damned. We want to be saved, and to do that we need to repent and gain wisdom from our own mistakes, and, if we are especially committed to seeking wisdom, we will gain just as much or hopefully much, much more wisdom by learning from the mistakes of others.
