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Dalton
Roberts |
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When a person makes a dramatic change for the better, someone has believed in them. That’s just the way this business of self-improvement works. If my sister, June, is not a saint I would not have the slightest idea what to look for in one. She does all her good works so quietly that she can walk in, whip the devil and leave before anyone knows what has happened. She took an interest one time in a bartender named Mary Lou. She saw beyond Mary Lou’s alcohol addiction to the beautiful person she was at her core. She always encouraged Mary Lou to quit drinking and allow that beautiful inner core to blossom. Mary Lou said wistfully, “When I talk to you, I feel like I can.” June said, “Then call me every time you are wrestling with the desire to drink.” That’s exactly what Mary Lou did. At all hours of the night, she would call and June would tell her the desire to drink was going to be taken from her. Sure enough, Mary Lou quit. She and June became fast friends and talked often until Mary Lou passed away. I remember when June got repaid for reaching out to Mary Lou. She injured her leg so bad in a car wreck that doctors wondered if she would ever have full use of it again. When I asked how she got her healthy leg back she told me it was because of Mary Lou’s faith. She had told Mary Lou she might never walk on that leg again and she said, “No! If you don’t have faith I will have enough faith for you.” June told me, “You can believe it or not but it was her faith that made me whole. From the day she told me I would walk, I started feeling better.” This beautiful thing of believing in each other has an echo effect. The person who activates their deepest and best self due to your confidence is often the very one who comes back to pull you out of the quicksand of defeat. When you show someone how to do something, you may forget what you taught but they do not. They walk on the scene with the still-fresh faith you stimulated in them and turn its shining power loose on you. Even if they have great parents, teenagers need other adults to confirm their worthiness and ratchet up their faith in their own self. A semi-illiterate Baptist preacher who lived down the road did that for me. He let me borrow his Olds 88 one time for every time I went to church with him and sang with his wife. He later asked me to read the Bible to him late at night when his family was asleep. He loved me so much and believed in me so strongly, that I could not let him down. I had just started sneaking and drinking beer when I met Brother Hubert but when I would take his car out, I just could not drink in it. I knew it would be a betrayal of the trust he had in me. One night when I had been reading to him he said, “Son, you have over 20 car nights built up. Why don’t you take them?” I said, “I don’t know, Brother Hubert. I guess I had just rather read to you. I don’t understand it but I know I think a lot different.” What Brother Hubert lacked in education he made up for by having an inner antenna as high as a flagpole. When his antenna told him he could trust this boy who had been kicked out of school and was headed down the wrong highway, he trusted his antenna. You and I need to raise our antenna and find someone we can believe in so much that they will learn to believe in their own self.
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