A woman awoke one morning with a headache.

But before walking to the medicine cabinet she took a stroll inside the corridors of her mind. She asked her headache.

'Why are you here and what have you brought me?'

'I've come to bring you gifts,' said the malady,. 'I've tried to deliver them in many ways and at many times, but perhaps today you are ready to receive them '

There were three gifts. She gradually underwrapped the first.

It was a picture of a hospital patient being wheeled into an operating room, his head bandaged so completely it was a wonder he could breathe.

'Boy, I hope he's ok,' she said, as she began to think of all the other people in the world suffering from head pain. Her first gift was empathy.

Unwrapping the next present she found a basket of medications, headache treatments both medical and natural, right at her fingertips. She had many roads to relief. 'I'm so lucky,' she said, realizing her second gift was gratitude.

Just then a surge of pain forced her to roll over on her bed where she gazed out the window. There she spotted a family of deer, four of them, grazing right there in the backyard. They paused and looked up at her for a long moment. 'Oh!,' she gasped at the rare sight, suddenly overwhelmed with the notion that she was not alone, God was with her, her third present.

'Oh headache,' she said, 'I thought you had come to bring darkness to my day, but you have brought light.'