Elder Richard L. Evans, of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, wrote:
Somewhere in some rendering of Don Quixote, there seems to linger a line from Sancho Panza which says: “He teaches well that lives well. That’s all the divinity I can understand.”49 It is profound, subtle, simple: “He teaches well that lives well.”
This touches upon the question of our influence on others, what people see in us and feel from us, when the stage is formally set, and when informally it isn’t. Teaching isn’t just saying something. It isn’t just the words we speak in the classroom, or the pulpit, or on finger-pointing occasions when we are laying down the law. It isn’t something we can turn on and off at an given hour, because we are visible also at other hours. It is what we do and what we think, what we condone and what we condemn. It is both subtle and obvious things that make up what we are.
“He teaches well that lives well.” Sometimes we speak as if just setting an example were sufficient, but it isn’t so much something we set as it is everything we are. Parents, teachers, everyone, and all of us are and example, no matter what we do—or don’t do. Whether we are honest or dishonest, concerned or indifferent, fair or unfair, we are an example of some sort every hour of every instant. The important point is, what kind of example? Where are young and impressionable people going if they go where we go, if they do what we’re doing, if they think what we’re thinking—if they become what we are?
And there is really no way for anyone to separate himself into segments, to say “At this hour I will teach, at another hour I will teach something else” —for a teacher teaches what he/she is as well as teaching their subject, and so does a parent; so do companions, so does a community.
And so we could say with Sancho: “He teaches well that lives well”— and might put it also in the opposite: He doesn’t teach well who doesn’t live well. It is a sobering lesson to learn. ~Richard L. Evans, The Man and the Message (Bookcraft Inc. 1973) 134-35
