She sifted through her memories and saw everything she had pursued—treasures she thought were of great value. They looked like discarded exhibits in a museum now overgrown with neglect. All their former glow had dimmed, and the rooms she had arranged felt more like a prison than the palace she thought she was building. The greatest pain was not caused by the ruin of it all, but by what she neglected in building it.
She had relegated her husband to unimportance over the past 20 years, and she had little to no relationship with her children. Those who should have mattered most grew distant.
Ambition had set her sights on power, fame, and prestige, and for a while, they sat in her hands, then dissolved. She had used her youth and beauty to fill her moldering museum of memories. She thought it would feed her soul for eternity, but everything she had stored up began to decay.
A fiery arrow had pierced her heart, and nothing she tried could dull the ache. The stage lights that once followed her had gone dark, and so had the windows of her soul.
She longed for escape, but she had been hedged in by the thorns she had planted. Her first thought was to return home to see if she could start again, but her old house had been abandoned, and everyone she loved had already moved on. She could neither run away nor reach out for help because her sins had pinned her down.
In her hopelessness, after every attempt to free herself cut deeper, she saw him. He wore a crown made from her hedge of thorns. His hands, feet, and side carried wounds she recognized, but he was no longer bound. He stood, full of life, and stepped toward her with compassion in his eyes.
In his presence, the prison she had built began to yield, the thorns began to retreat, and the fiery arrow in her heart was extinguished and removed.
He wiped away what her sin had built, and everywhere decay had been, life took hold.
-D. Eaton
The Fight of Faith 