The edge of a cornfield.

In the year 1994, my family was living in a tiny shack that was constantly flooded. Our home was settled at the edge of a cornfield, not too far away from a huge nuclear power plant in Northern Illinois.

My father came from the ghettos of Chicago, and my mother, an immigrant from Lithuania, who against all odds escaped the Soviet regime. She delivered me at home by herself without assistance from midwives nor any doctors, just like my two older brothers. I was named Akiane.

We slept and played on moldy floors. There was no kitchen, barely any furniture. And we made our own toys and games, and we built our own school.

As kids, we would often walk through a remote village with mom in hopes of finding friends, but one door after another was shut in front of us. Outside of the house, we felt no safety. One neighbor was murdered. Another tried shooting our dog. Yet another threatened us because we did not attend a church. The next door neighbor purposely burned trash close to our shack causing fires we were forced to extinguish.

When our drinking water was poisoned, my father fell deathly ill, and we had no money for doctors.

While my mother looked for different ways to support our family, my older brothers watched over me and took care of me. Day and night.

We walked in two feet high snow to different towns selling food door to door. Within a year, the business grew and so did I.

My best memories.

My dad's health slowly began improving, and my mother's business became successful. I moved into a new home in Missouri, a massive 10,000 square foot Frank Lloyd Wright mansion. My best memories came from living there.

For the first time, we rode bicycles. We fished in our lake, swam in our indoor pool. From morning to night, we created our own music. We prepared our own meals. There was no TV or radio in the house.

Since I had no relatives or friends nearby, my older brothers were my best friends and mentors. And my parents, my real role models.

Visions of heaven.

Around age four, I started experiencing intense dreams and visions of heaven. My mother was an atheist, yet she was the only one who listened to me for hours on end and believed what I was describing were my real experiences.

I'd never been drawn to read, but I sketched everything I remembered from my dreams and visions, including two celestial beings who were especially close to me. I drew one of them, my angel. But each time I tried sketching the second face from memory, it kept fading away.

As soon as my dad's health improved, my mother surprised everyone by suddenly quitting the business and putting her house on the market. She wanted to spend more time with us, especially me because she started believing that the heaven I had seen was real.

One spring day when I was around five years old, something unexplainable happened. I disappeared.

Hundreds of vehicles in our small town were stopped for inspection, but nobody could find me. It was as if I dropped off the radar somehow undetectable. My photo was dispatched throughout all local agencies. After many long hours of searching, I reappeared in the midst of numerous eyewitnesses. Neither the officers nor my family could comprehend what had really happened, but I did.

After that mysterious incident, I couldn't stop drawing in color pastels and would sometimes stay awake throughout the night sketching. During the day, I would feel very tired and weak. Occasionally, I participated in art fairs and public art competitions, but I only felt discouraged.

I even briefly attended a public school nearby. One of the teachers was constantly angry with me because I kept correcting all the lines in the coloring books. I thought the lines were all wrong.

Around the same time, my visions disappeared. I lost inspiration to do art altogether.

Four in the morning.

When my third brother Ilia was born at home, my family was on the brink of bankruptcy, and we had to move again.

On 09/11/2001, we found a small house to rent in Colorado. There was not a day living in those Rocky Mountains without some sort of accident or life threatening sickness in our family. I tried to get back into art, but I just couldn't. It was writing poetry that became my main focus.

Soon, our whole family decided to move again because my dad got a job in Idaho. At age eight, I began homeschooling myself, and it was a decision my family supported. My vivid vision suddenly returned and so did my passion for art.

I fell in love with oils and acrylics. And every day, I would wake up at four in the morning to paint and learn from my own mistakes.

The Carpenter.

One of my earliest visions kept on returning to my mind, but I knew it was impossible for me to paint it. I wanted to try anyway. For many months, I searched everywhere looking for the right face. I somehow knew I could not find it on my own.

So one morning, I decided to pray the whole day that a model would be brought right to our front door. The very next day at noon, the doorbell rang. One of our acquaintances stopped by to introduce her friend to me. She thought that maybe I would find his features suitable for my art.

Standing almost seven feet tall, a stranger not only closely resembled one of my recurrent memories of Jesus, but he was a real carpenter. I was speechless and humbled.

After forty hours of painting, I couldn't move a finger. There was still so much left to paint, but I was too drained to go on, and I had to stop.

We shipped the original to one art agent for an exhibition, but he decided to steal the portrait. Unexpectedly, Jesus became a hostage. The painting was later sold for virtually nothing. For many years, I was not able to see my original Prince of Peace again, only the photographs and reproductions.

Outside of my family circle, no one seemed to care about my art. Some even suggested burning all my paintings and writings. It was after many months of malicious reactions from skeptics and critics, and an expensive separation from my agent that my story reached media.

At age nine, I received an invitation to be a guest on the Oprah Winfrey show. In a flash, my world changed — thanks to hundreds of television and radio interviews and appearances in art shows. By age 10, my first book unexpectedly became a bestseller. My painted messages had reached millions of people around the globe and had raised funds for charities.

Over the years, I painted different periods in Jesus' life. But my grief over the loss of my favorite portrait never lessened. For the next twelve years, God took me on an extraordinary journey around the world to paint true life stories.

Not too long after my fourth brother, Aurelius, was born, while we were living in Australia, unexpectedly, I discovered the location of the original Prince of Peace painting. It had been hidden out of sight, all wrapped up and locked away in a vault for the past twelve years. The owner was not willing to reveal it or sell it to anyone.

The farm and the coin.

When I turned 22, I moved to a small farm in the countryside close to Chicago, Illinois. The founder of one of the top coin minting companies in the world flew out to see me. He invited me to collaborate on the Prince of Peace image that would be minted on a gold coin. It was an awkward assignment, but I agreed.

The pencil and the prayer.

In preparation for the complicated minting process, I was asked to outline the face I'd painted at age eight.

As I was accentuating the lines of the new sketch, I became more and more frustrated because the sketch for minting a coin was supposed to be very simple. Oddly, the more I pressed the pencil down, the more details revealed themselves. And the more I saw, the more uncomfortable I felt.

I actually started wondering why I was seeing so many details, and why I was hearing a new message.

So I prayed about what to do next. And was blown away by the unexpected answer.

The veil.

Despite all of my doubts, I took out a linen canvas and started painting my vision. I knew it was going to be an enormous challenge because all I could see was half of the image. I had no idea when the complete face would be revealed or how long the fine details would remain in my sight.

On Christmas Eve, I woke up from a nightmare that my portrait got completely destroyed. I rushed to my studio and what I noticed alarmed me. The shadow side was lifeless. It was as if there was a mysterious veil covering half of the face, stopping me from painting any further.

No matter how much I tried removing the veil or painting over it, I just couldn't do it. Many weeks passed by, but there was still no life in the shadow. I was devastated. I could not eat or sleep. I could not even talk with anyone for a month.

All my efforts to finish the painting were futile. I had given everything I had to this painting, but it still wasn't enough. I was painting the impossible. I was losing hope, and I was about to abandon the divine commission.

After a thousand hours of this relentless battle, one morning something miraculous happened. For a very brief time, I got to see the full vision. I began working round the clock until finally, the veil disappeared and the portrait came to life.

All these years, God was waiting for me to grow so I could fully understand and paint the most powerful message to mankind.