The farmer may only be planting a seed,

"What are you doing?" he asked.

The first worker, a young, impatient man, replied in disgust, "I am making three dollars an hour and I'm getting very tired!" 

The visitor asked another man the same question. "I'm mixing concrete, as you can plainly see," came the sarcastic reply. 

Finally, a woman working nearby left her wheelbarrow full of bricks and approached the stranger. "We are building a hospital," she said with pride. "Now we will be able to care for all the region's people. Babies will be born here."

"Lives will be saved."

The stranger looked at the woman with admiration and spoke directly to her. "I know, for this is my hospital. Only you hold the vision of what it is you are creating."

The wealthy benefactor then put the woman in charge of construction so his hospital would be built by one who truly understood.

But he wasn't.

He knew himself well, and accepted himself, even his darker side. He could laugh at himself and celebrate his humanness. 

And because he loved and accepted himself just as he was, others could do the same.

That's difficult to understand sometimes, but it's true: no one else is going to love and accept us until we come to love and accept ourselves. 

We teach others how to treat us by the way we treat ourselves, so perhaps it makes sense to apply a variation of the Golden Rule:

"Do unto ourselves as we would have others do unto us."