Believing in Yourself

There is a mouse I love.  It was a joke mum used to tell.  What did the mouse say when the lion asked, “why aren’t you big and strong like I am?”  The mouse (in his littlest mouse voice) “I’ve been sick.”  He did not see his problem as one of size, but one of health.  He believed in himself.
I read something I thought was beautiful.  Part of it was familiar to me but the rest I read for the first time.  It was penned in the form of a poem by Roy Croft.  I write it in sentences.  “I love you, not for what you are, but for what I am when I am with you.  I love you, not only for what you have made of yourself, but for what you are making me.  I love you, for the part of me that you bring out;…” and this is the part that I re-read several times “…I love you, for putting your hand into my heaped up heart, and passing over all the foolish, weak things that you can’t help dimly seeing there, and drawing out into the light all the beautiful belongings that no one else had looked quite far enough to find.  I love you, because you are helping me to make of the lumber of my life, not a tavern, but a temple; out of works of my every day, not a reproach, but a song.
I was reading about the love between Charles Lindbergh and his wife.  She became an author and famous in her own right.  Part of what I read that I really liked was, “a husbands love that is strong enough to reassure, but unthreatened enough to release.  Tight enough to embrace but loose enough to enjoy.  Magnetic enough to hold, yet magnanimous enough to allow for flight…”  No wonder George Eliot said, “Blessed is the influence of one true, loving human soul on another.”
To me, love is all about not having to, but wanting to.  What I particularly like about the line that talks about “…I love you, for putting your hand into my heaped up heart, and passing over all the foolish, weak things that you can’t help dimly seeing there, and drawing out into the light all the beautiful belongings that no one else had looked quite far enough to find…” is that no one knows me like me, my short-comings, and the “foolish, weak things…” 
I don’t thrive on being reminded of those things.  They are before me every day.  What I need to be constantly reminded of is the untapped potential in me.  The possibilities.  I am gold with impurities.  I need the gold exposed and the impurities dealt with to reveal what I can be.
So often the problem is not someone else believing in me, but me believing in myself.  That can seem hard.  I know myself too well.  Yet beyond this marred and frail human existence, Someone knows me better, and “draws out into the light all the beautiful belongings that no one else had looked quite far enough to find.”