She became one of those smiling, happy people, just like on the cover of the tract.

She had exhausted her worldly understanding.

She could find, it seemed, no peace, in all the worldly systems, and even turned to drugs and alcohol.  People talk about "rock bottom", and she had reached it.  She was sleeping in a friend's car at nights.  She didn't have access to a bathroom; she had to go to edge of the treeline and make her toilet as if she were a squirrel or a raccoon.

She despaired of life, and was just marking time for its own sake.

Until a trip to the library, where she used the public computers free of charge.

There was a tract, a pile of tracts on a counter.  

She took one.

Part of her was thinking that she could fall into the charity of that local ministry, let them take of her, but that wasn't the mainline of her thinking.  She had questions about the life of faith.  I mean, "what made them so different?"  Even on the cover of the tract, photos, the people were happy, seemingly captured in mid-laugh.

She found the word, and pretty soon thereafter, the pieces started falling into place.  It wasn't all at once, the change, but it came on slow, like one of those big heavy glaciers, slow-coming changes that would last and last in her life.  Her getting a source of income, becoming more the person she wanted to be, even taking up with her previously-abandoned children.

Soon enough, she was one of those happy people, like on the tract.

She thought to herself that having changed, she should dropped some of her fair-weather drug addicted friends, that she was a no creature in Christ, and she shouldn't associate with them anymore.

But she wanted them, too, to experience the hope and peace she felt.  Indeed, if she showed them the sunshine of hope and faith, it might have been the only sunshine that some of them saw in a given day.

She had indeed became a new creature in Christ, and thusly, she wanted to share the message.  She hadn't read through the passage of the Great Commission, but she was already following that teaching, without having ever heard it.  She was becoming a beacon for the Lord, of hope in Christ and faith in God, the healing powers of hope and faith.

And so it was.