The Savior asked, “What manner of men ought ye to be? Verily I say unto you, even as I am.” (3 Nephi 27:27). The word manner comes from the Latin word for hand. In the scriptures, the hand, especially the Hand of the Lord, is a symbol of creation, power, authority, cleanliness, judgment, and mercy. I think that it is important when we consider how we might live and act and be after the manner of our Savior Jesus Christ that we think about what this might look like in the context of His hand in our life. More specifically, what it might be like to walk the way that is set before us hand in hand with our Savior. In many of the Savior’s miracles, it says that he took them by the hand. David said, “let us fall now into the hand of the Lord; for his mercies are great.” (2 Samuel 24:14). Isaiah, speaking as if he were the Messiah, said “I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands” (Isaiah 49:16). Elsewhere, in several places Isaiah said that for all that the Lord’s anger is not turned away, “his hand is stretched out still (Isaiah 9:12). In setting a standard to be as perfect as He is, Jesus is setting an impossibly high bar. But successfully attaining such a lofty mode of being isn’t the point. We don’t strive for perfection with the expectation that we will reach it in this life. When the Lord has his hand stretched out to us, we take Him by the hand even as He takes us by the hand and we follow after Him in our own feeble and maladroit way, stumbling and tripping and falling all the while because in the end, if perfection is off the table, trying to be perfect makes us better even when we inevitably fall short of our goal. After a lifetime of trying to be like Jesus, the gulf between who we are and who we must become to truly be like Him may seem to have shrunk very little, but we will be amazed at how much of a distance our efforts put between who we started out as and who we ended up as at the end of our mortal journey assuming we have truly tried to live after the manner of Christ-like perfection by holding tight to our Savior’s hands as we trip and fall but always stagger forwards and upwards by His side.
