There once was a woman who was diagnosed with cancer. She stood at the mirror and looked at herself in despair. Her beauty was gone, and she no longer knew who she was inside. She tried to look into her eyes to find some answers. All she found were tears of sorrow that kept streaming down her face. She felt no love from anyone, and she didn’t even like herself. She wanted to die, but she was afraid of death. She withered away a little every day as she lost her hair and lost so much weight from not eating.
This woman never told anyone how she felt because she didn’t think that anyone cared. She wasn’t sure if there was anything out in the world that was listening to her cries at night. She didn’t really know how to pray but thought she would try it. Every time she felt the pain of living inside and every time she felt sick from all the medications for her illness, she would pray to a God whom she didn’t understand.
Then one day when she was sick and didn’t care if she died, she prayed for peace and said to herself that she could not live this way any longer. She had heard about a God who was supposed to help when asked. So she cried out with all of her desperation for something to give her the strength to get through her days.
Then one day as she helped someone get a picture in a store, she saw the words that she had been praying for so long. She heard a voice that told her to write everything down that she thought from that day forward. As she wrote the words that came, they were like none she had ever written before. Now she has never spoken before about how bad she was feeling, and as she wrote the words that came to her, they were about how to find Something Greater. She was scared and all alone but knew the words were special. She wanted to write all the time to make sure she didn’t miss anything she heard inside her thoughts.
As she wrote, she began to realize that when she was at her most desperate is when she recognized the painting’s words as a message for herself. The words she wrote became messages from Something Greater. Some of the words she did not understand, but she knew that they were important.
As she worked with such determination to write the thoughts that turned into messages, her life began to change. All the despair and all of the pain began to leave her inside. One day she looked in the mirror and saw the light behind her eyes that seemed to speak back to her. She wanted to share this newfound strength with anyone who would listen. As she spoke and told her story, she began to heal. The scars from her surgeries were now battle wounds that were left upon her body, and she knew that the war for her life was right within herself.
All of her life she had let someone else tell her what to do. All her life she lived in fear and never thought of herself. As she wrote, she started out wanting to spread this message: “Something Greater is at work and I know how to find it.” As she told her story to others, people began to want to know how she went from being so sad to so happy.