Most of us don't pay attention to this area of our lives!

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A while ago, I used to struggle teaching the kids around me to treat each other better than they often did. You know how you could tell a stubborn 4-year old child, "I'll slap you!" and then, weird as it sounds, you eventually hear him/her telling his/her younger sibling exactly the same thing, in the same way. When you often address her mother (just because she's your buddy) as, "You babe...", it's weird when the 2-year old calls her mother by the same 'title'!

At the end of my struggle, I realized the only solution would be for me to do what I wanted them to do, as well as treat them like I would want them to treat each other. No matter how many times I corrected  them verbally, they only seemed to do what they saw me do.

Have you realized that you may unconsciously adopt your friends' funny behaviors? For example, laughing out loudly, or laughing quietly, using a given term, disliking or liking similar things, and stuff like that.

Yes, we are all imitators; we find ourselves imitating other people, sometimes consciously and very often unconsciously. Yet most of us tend to pay little attention to the topic of imitation and who is in front of us.

We need to be intentional about who we are imitating so that we are secure that if we end up imitating  them and/or unconsciously adopting their behavior, we will be fair off. 

please allow me to share a little from 13-year old Enid Mercy Nakibuuka's book, "Imitators Of God" about this very topic:

"We are all imitators at one point or another, sometimes we don’t know that we are imitating someone, and sometimes we do. We may find ourselves imitating our parents, people in our society, a certain celebrity, a TV show, our siblings and relatives, our pastors or even_ Jesus!

The celebrity, pastor, or whomever it is that you may find yourself imitating, also has his/her struggles and weaknesses, in spite of his/her strengths and status. Since the people we look up to and want to be like also have their own struggles with this thing called life, then who exactly can we look up to in order to live a successful (Christian) life?

Now, please quote me right; I don’t mean to say that we can’t follow the example of good men and women of God, or those that life has brought into our path. Of course, we can! However, we need to be careful that we don’t imitate their vices too. We ought to be imitators of God first, before we begin looking up to other people, then we will surely understand the way we should take, even in times when the people we look up to are not taking that same way. It will help us to tell what to imitate from people and what not to. 

How then can we be imitators of God? I mean the “guy” is up there, all big, all-knowing, and as if that is not enough, He is a Spirit being. How then can I, a mere human, begin to imitate God?"

 

Enid Mercy continues to share about how, why, and when to imitate God; and my best part from her amazing book is, "What we say we prioritize vs what our actions say we prioritize."

In here, she shares an example of how we don't see Jesus reacting when people insulted him, spat on him, and even beat him. But then when he found those who were selling stuff inside his father's house, he reacted like we'd never seen him do before, meaning that his actions and his words were in sync with the fact that he prioritized his father's business.

A blessed Wednesday as we get intentional about who, how and why we imitate or look up to the people we do. 

To know more about Enid Mercy Nakibuuka and her works please click here or here.

To support her by purchasing her new book (e-copy or paperback) on Amazon, please click here or for deliveries in and around Kampala (Uganda), please contact +256 757 673398 or +256 784 852110.