Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Never try to make anyone like yourself. You know, and God knows, that one of you is enough.”
It is a marvelous thing to contemplate that there has never been another “you,” ever. Even identical twins are not really identical. It means that each of us is truly unique, which is reason enough for us not to try to make another person be exactly like us. In My Fair Lady, Professor Higgins laments by singing, “Why can’t a woman be more like a man?” Instead he should have been singing, “There will never ever be another you,” because we are each one of a kind.
This being said, while we are all different, yet we are also so much alike. Human nature is human nature. Each is so unique and yet all so much alike — sounds like an oxymoron, doesn’t it?
Snowflakes may look alike to us, yet we are told that each crystal is different. Each of us is obviously a human being, we have a great deal in common, yet scientists tell us that no two of us have the same DNA, fingerprints, stomach shape or a host of other characteristics that show our individuality.
Our Creator made us each a unique individual, and yet He has given all of us His commandments to follow. While we are all different, we are supposed to be like His Son, for He has told us, through Paul, “For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son.” Certainly there has never been another like our Lord Jesus Christ, and yet we are told that we should try to conform to his image, and that he is the one we should follow.
Children are great mimics and they try to be like those they admire. As God’s children, we need to take care whom we admire and mimic, because as Paul tells us, “We do not dare to classify or compare ourselves with some who commend themselves. When they measure themselves by themselves and compare themselves with themselves, they are not wise.”
We can always find others to compare ourselves to and think, “Well, compared to them I am not so bad.” When we compare ourselves to the Lord Jesus Christ, we all fall woefully short, but he is the one we should imitate.
So as Emerson said, we should not try to make anyone like us. And from Paul we learn that we should not compare ourselves to others, but we should strive to be conformed to the image of Christ.
In our mortal state, we will never measure up, but just think that very soon he is coming, and Paul tells us that when he comes, he will “change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto his glorious body.” Notice he did not say, change our “vile” minds.
We cannot do much about our body, but we do have control over what we think, and if we will change our thoughts now to think like Jesus, then when he comes he will change our vile bodies. “Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is.”
Rather than trying to make others be like us, let us concentrate on trying to make ourselves be more like Jesus. Again Paul tells us, “For who hath known the mind of the Lord, that he may instruct him? But we have the mind of Christ.” By working at thinking like Jesus now, we will be like him in nature when he comes. We pray that the words we often sing will soon be true: “We shall be like him, O how rich the promise.”
Robert J. Lloyd
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