After graduating from Mater Dei High School back in 1984, my parents sent me on a tour of Europe sponsored by the school. One of our stops was Dachau, a Nazi concentration camp in Munich, Germany.

What a startling experience it was for this Bubble Yum-chewing, Walkman-wearing teen to behold ovens in which humans were baked and concrete "showers" that gassed unsuspecting women and their children. I'll never forget when our tour guide pointed out the vertical grooves in the walls made by the fingernails of panicking prisoners.

While there, I picked up a small prayer card imprinted with words carved into a camp wall:

I believe in the sun, even when it is not shining
I believe in love, even when I feel it not
I believe in God, even when He is silent.

I carried the card home and kept it next to my bed. Every day, I thought of the person who wrote those words and the horrors he or she must have witnessed. Though evil had seemingly triumphed, this prisoner's faith in God survived.

Last year, a good friend of mine introduced me, via e-mail, to a four-year-old boy in her preschool class. His cancer, which had been treated the year before, had relapsed. My friend asked me to keep her little student in my prayers. Thus began my journey --- largely from afar --- with Diego and his parents.

I logged into Diego's CaringBridge website and began to get regular posts from his mother, Michelle. Her journal took me into daily life of a mother enduring the worst of tortures: watching her little son suffer week after week, month after month. Yet, Michelle's faith did not diminish; in fact, it grew stronger. She ended each post with this verse from Hebrews 11:1: Faith is the reality of things being hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.

Michelle, like the verse-writer in the concentration camp, held tight to God in her darkness. Some would have let their doubt take reign, would have allowed their anger to fester into faithlessness. But not Michelle. And certainly not Diego.

At one point, it became necessary to amputate most of Diego's right arm. The trauma of this took its toll on his family and friends. Amazingly, we were comforted by the little patient himself. Before the surgery, Michelle posted this:

"Diego told me last night that he was going to be brave and for me not to cry."

And, from her post-surgery post:

"His first reply when he was half-awake from anesthesia was 'I have a little arm --- now I can't pray!' I told him all he needed to pray was to simply talk to God in his own mind, and that there is no correct way to pray."

But, the following words resonated with me most deeply, spoken by Diego once he grasped that most of his right arm was gone: "I like my little arm!"

Huh? He likes his "little arm"? I realized, then, that Diego was no ordinary child. He took the scariest and most painful part of his life, which was permanently and forever represented on his body, and embraced it. I suddenly knew that this was how Christ wants each of us to bear our crosses --- with complete acceptance and trust in Him.

Diego was determined to beat his cancer, but he did not. His valiant fight ended last Christmas Eve. Although he lived only five years, he changed many lives in his corner of the world. I, for one, will forever be grateful to Diego for showing me how to live --- how to take life's darkest moments and, together with God, transform them into a shining, everlasting light.

Christa Chavez and her family attend St. Maria Goretti Church, Long Beach.