Maybe you don’t know what a carbon copy is. Except perhaps to know it’s what the “cc” stands for when you email someone.

But you’ve seen it work. You’ve seen the receipt books, where someone writes on the top page, and there are two or three different colored copies of the same form beneath the top page, so what’s written on the top page gets transferred? Workers who come to your house often have receipt books to take a copy and leave a copy.

People used carbon paper in typewriters to make multiple copies at once (although the back pages were often lighter or smeared). My husband’s grandma wrote letters to her daughters with carbon paper between, so she could share the same news with half the writing time.

But carbon copies are never identical to the original. The carbon paper shifts or smears. Inconsistent pressure with writing created differences. And there was no erasing.

Carbon copies are handy when emailing people. We get to communicate with several people at once. (But please use “bcc” – blind carbon copy – when emailing a lot of people, so everyone doesn’t have everyone else’s email address to spam later or can “reply all” and inundate our inboxes with chatter.)

But the concept of carbon copies has it’s drawbacks, especially when we try to apply it to people. For example, we declare what a mom should do or look like, or what a successful person does or looks like. We declare a look or behavior as less or more manly, attractive, or worthwhile. Then we hold ourselves and others to the standards we claim.

Standards aren’t bad, but projecting the need to squeeze into a mold can be harmful, not to mention a waste of time. Becoming like someone isn’t the same as becoming the person. We have role models and try to emulate their most positive attributes, but we can never become them.

In the Christian faith, we often emphasize the importance of becoming like Jesus.  But we aren’t and never will be the same as Him. We look up to Paul, David, Ruth, and Mary, but we don’t become them. We respect people who have mentored and taught us, but we don’t become them. We gather the very best of them and let those qualities seep into our lives, and we become the best us we can be.

We’re not the same, and we weren’t intended to be. We have common, but not identical, purpose. We have threads of similarities with streaks of differences. We have unity but not uniformity.

Becoming like in order to become ourselves. No carbon copies.