She threw all her bills into the waste basket without opening them up. The kids were outside playing at the neighbors house. Her husband, as usual, had simply disappeared without saying a word to her, slamming the door behind him, stalking silently into the cool evening. He was probably drinking beer with his friends and watching a football game. Anything to be out of the house. Anything to be away from her.

She sat down on her couch and put her face in her hands.

"How did things get this bad?" she asked herself.

Somehow she couldn't cry. She had got so used to suppressing her feelings that all she felt was a numb sensation. It was like an anesthesia over her broken heart.

She worked hard at her job as a cashier at the grocery store--but it wasn't enough. And Jim seemed to have given up on finding another job after he was laid off from the bakery.

Suddenly a strange vision appeared in her mind's eye.

It was an angel wearing the body of her 12-year-old son, Matt. The same splash of red hair, with the same freckles on his amiable chubby cheeks. The same disarming soft eyes of pale green, like the waters of the lake on a cloudy day she remembered when she was growing up in Michigan. And the same beguiling smile.

"I wonder what angels look like," she mused to herself.

"That's not the right question?" said her angel.

"What is it then?"

"What do your thoughts look like?"

"I have no idea."

"Just look around you. What you have. The people in your life. The pattern of your experiences.

"Those are your thoughts made visible.

"From the invisible they have sprung into the visible world.

"The evidence of who you are and what you think is all around you.

"And if you don't like it you can change it."

"How?" she asked.

"The same way.

"You probably want an example.

"If you don't have enough money right now for all your needs, you have been thinking about how difficult it is to make money. You have then proved to yourself exactly how this is true.

"If you want to have more money than your expenses, you have to think about your reality in this way. You have to think, "I have more money than bills. All my needs are met as I express my creative talents." And so on.

"The general pattern of your thoughts, consistently applied over time, will make it the way you desire.

"Many people, of course, know all about this. Yet few demonstrate it. This is because the habitual power of your thoughts has a greater pull on you. It's much easier to live out the past than to boldly seek refuge in the future. It's easier to believe in the evidence of things seen than in the evidence of things that can come to be."

Just then her son, Matt, came into the room. Seeing his mother sitting on the couch with a far away look in her eye, he came and sat quietly beside her.

"It'll get better, Mom," he said.

"It already has."

"How?"

"An angel visited me."

"What do angels look like?"

"They look like the people you love."

"What do they do Mom?"

"They remind you that you have the power to change anything."

"How?"

"By giving up the belief that you gave it away and can't get it back."