Sheila Johnson-Glover knew something was wrong when her doctor asked her to sit down after a routine mammogram in December 2009.

"Uh-oh," she thought. That had never happened before. She was instructed get an ultrasound and an MRI. When Johnson-Glover, then 43, met with the doctor again, he showed her the scans.

"You see this white stuff?" he said. "That's breast cancer that has metastasized to your liver and ribs." He told her she had stage 4 breast cancer.

Johnson-Glover didn't know what to think. Her mother had died of breast cancer about a dozen years earlier.  

"How many stages are there?" she asked.

"Well, you're at it," the doctor said.

Johnson-Glover, now 49, worked at Scott Air Force Base as a records manager. Her best friend's husband was dying of prostate cancer. When he died a few months after her diagnosis, she called her friend bawling.

"I'm scared I'm going to die. I'm scared I'm going to leave my daughter," she cried.

"Sheila, stop it," her friend said. "And stay off the internet." There are women living with stage 4 breast cancer beyond the five-year survival rate, she said.

Johnson-Glover took her words to heart. In addition to an 11-hour surgery to remove her right breast and 13 lymph nodes, she underwent nine months of chemotherapy. She took a medical retirement after 25 years in the Air Force.

The aim was to stop the spread of the disease. After a year and a half of no growth, the cancer started progressing again. She went back on chemo. The doctors declared her disease stable in August 2013.

Two years later, she embarked on an adventure that would change the way she saw her battle with cancer. It started when she noticed a Facebook post from a friend who also had stage 4 cancer. She was raising money for a trip to South Africa. Johnson-Glover, who had always wanted to take a missionary trip, decided to apply for the same program, even though it wasn't a religious trip.

Terri Wingham, a breast cancer survivor, founded the nonprofit A Fresh Chapter that runs the program. She has taken 60 participants since 2011 to volunteer at various international destinations to heal the emotional scars that cancer leaves.

"When you get sick, you feel really unlucky," she explained. "We create an opportunity for people to feel lucky again." She wants survivors to see themselves as empowered rather than a victim of a disease. The program costs $5,000, and about half the participants receive some subsidy or scholarship.

Johnson-Glover started fundraising online. She emailed friends and sent letters. She was still far from the goal and discouraged until an anonymous donor offered to match $1,500 if she could raise it. Then, she won a grant from the Silver Linings Foundation for $1,800.

She made it. She flew out from Chicago to New Delhi in March, where she met 13 other men and women who are cancer survivors. She and three others would be working at a school in the slums for 3- to 7-year-olds. She would be teaching English and other basic lessons.

They volunteered every morning until noon during the two-week trip, and then took part in group activities, such as learning how to breathe using yoga techniques. A deep bond developed between the entire group.

"I was able to share my story with people who knew how I felt," Johnson-Glover said.  

On their last day in New Delhi, with all the children clamored around her to say goodbye, one of the teachers handed her note.

"Thank you for all you have done," it said. "Though thank you is not enough." Johnson-Glover started to cry.

"I realized it wasn't what we could give them. What mattered to them was our presence."

She and her co-travelers visited the Taj Mahal. Johnson-Glover was struck with the realization that she was not her cancer. She was not her treatment. She felt inspired to do more.

Each of the cancer survivors attended a burning ceremony before they left India. They wrote down what they wanted to leave behind. She wrote 'negativity' and threw it in the fire pit. "I have no space for it my life right now."

She came back to Swansea, Illinois, and continues to volunteer as an advocate for breast cancer survivors. She is graduating next month with a Master in Business Administration from McKendree University. She has inspired her daughter to want to go on a missionary trip.

She said her experience has shown her daughter that no matter what you go through in life, you can still make it. Johnson-Glover admits that there is always a fear with which she lives.

"I don't let it consume me," she said. "If fear consumes me, I'm letting cancer win. And I refuse to let cancer win." She was devastated when she lost her mother, who had been her best friend. So, when she was diagnosed, she realized she needed to fight to help find a cure.

"I need to fight hard. I don't want this to happen to my daughter," she said. "That's why I advocate so much -- for her. It's not about me anymore. It's about my daughter."

I am embarrassed about my number.

I don't like what it suggests about me. But I'm willing to confess it publicly, in hopes that I will make better choices moving forward.

Here it is: The details are blurry now, but I'm fairly certain I read fewer than 10 books last year.

This puts me below the average for women, who read 14 books in the previous 12 months, according to a 2014 Pew Research Center study. It also puts me below the average for college-educated people, who read 17. The median number of books read annually by American adults is far lower: about five, meaning half of us are reading fewer than five books in a year. But for someone who grew up a bookworm -- consuming at least 50 books a year for most of my youth -- this under-10 realization is shameful.

Oddly, I'm reading all the time: blog posts, pithy tweets, essays on my phone while I wait in lines. But it's byte-sized reading. It's qualitatively different from the immersive, sustained experience of reading a novel or a long work of nonfiction.

I'm not the only book lover who has strayed.

Nicole Thompson of O'Fallon, Missouri, started a book club about six years ago. When the club started, most people would read the selected book, she said, but that gradually changed.

"Over the years, only a couple of people would read the book," Thompson said. One month, not one person finished it.

Like her, the other members are time-starved working mothers. So about six months ago, she allowed the group to pick articles or blog posts instead of full-length novels. This option made it easier to get together during the hectic months of November and December.

"We're not opposed to doing books" in the club, she said. "It's just that people have less time."

Parents consistently say they want to raise readers. Trends show that young boys and older teens are reading less today than they did before smartphones and digital distractions monopolized leisure time, and that's cause for worry. The number of American children who say they love reading books for fun has dropped by nearly 10 percent in the last four years, according to Scholastic's 2015 Kids and Family Reading Report.

It's not that young people don't enjoy reading. It's that the other stuff they enjoy creates incredibly tough competition. Children have near-constant access to media that's either more fun or easier to mindlessly, intermittently consume. The percent of children who play games or apps on an electronic device at least five days a week has risen from a third in 2010 to half of respondents in 2014, according to the Scholastic report.

Even as a middle-aged adult, I can relate.

When I look at posts on Medium, the online publishing platform, I glance at the "reading time" metric posted right above the headline. I've bookmarked long-form essays that end up in the TL;DR (too long; didn't read) digital wastebasket. And I have large stacks of unread books next to my bed, on my desk and in our study room. It's the paradox of this Information Age that I am reading 10 to 12 hours a day and still finishing far fewer books than I did a decade ago.

Would I be happy if my children read as few books as I do currently? Of course not.

I want them to be the voracious book reader I was years ago. I want them to get lost for days in a story, to inhabit richly drawn worlds in their imaginations, to take a journey with a writer and discover new ideas along the way.

There's a socio-economic and educational link between those who read books frequently and those who don't. Those with college and graduate degrees, and those in higher income brackets, report reading the greatest number of books per year. But if our attention spans have shortened or our interests have shifted, our love of books won't translate to future generations.

"We are all capable of reading good books," Thompson said. She doesn't think her book club's evolution to blogs and articles speaks to a change in attention span.

I want to prove her correct by reviving my own book habit.

At this point, it's not even about setting an example for my children.

It's about reconnecting with a part of myself that I miss.

In America, there are plenty of families who embrace the cultural side of religion even if they aren't convinced of the God part. Some children will participate in Easter egg hunts but have never attended a church service. Others will grow up to describe themselves as secular Jews, lapsed Catholics or non-practicing Muslims.

The Pew Research Center finds that one of the most well-documented shifts over the past decade has been the rising share of people who are religiously unaffiliated: from 16 percent in 2007 to 23 percent in 2014. There are more children growing up as "nones" -- with no particular religion -- than ever before.

Of course, a parent can raise moral, empathetic children without religious beliefs. But the majority of Americans still identify with a religious faith.

For a child in such a household, there are significant spiritual milestones, such as a confirmation, a bar mitzvah -- or my own children's recent Ameen, which marked the completion of their recitation of the Quran in Arabic.

This milestone moment made me reconsider the reasons my husband and I chose to raise our children in a religious tradition, and what we hope they will take from it. It's especially challenging when one's religion is as vilified and misunderstood as Islam currently is in America.

Across faiths, people turn to their belief systems for guidance, hope, comfort, ritual, a sense of community and acceptance, and salvation. Religion feeds the desire to be better. It's a way to acknowledge that there are unknowns. Science can't explain certain mysteries of the universe and human existence. From the beginning of time, humans have told stories to fill in the gaps.

When they become parents, the faithful offer their children a foundation of religious beliefs, which we hope will teach them moral responsibility and discipline that comes from adhering to a system of values.

In our home, our faith has a particular emphasis on justice and one's own actions. A key focus is on empathy. The major rituals in Islam, such as fasting and giving to charity, are explained around this idea of empathizing with your fellow human. The practice of daily prayers increases mindfulness and gratitude. Research shows daily meditation or prayer lowers stress and improves mood. It gives the worshipper an opportunity to reflect on her thankfulness, which is a key to happiness.

Simultaneously, this daily conversation with a higher power gives us a chance to humble ourselves, to ask for forgiveness and give voice to our struggles and pain.

Prayer, in fact, can be healing.

If life is a search for meaning, a religious tradition offers a guidebook. I don't want my children to turn to their faith for easy answers, but to struggle with questions about the nature of good and evil, fate and free will, reason and faith. I studied the world's great religions in college and have attended services of several other religious traditions. We are not threatened by the religious beliefs of others, nor would we raise our children to be. The bedrock separation of church and state in our country allows both to flourish.

I've found most Americans are curious and willing to ask frank questions. I've been asked any number of questions about Islam by adults: Why would a woman who is a feminist subscribe to a faith that seems oppressive to women? What do Muslims think about Jews? What would you say about this video (insert link to Islamophobic propaganda)?

Raised and educated in the faith, I can answer for my own experience and theological interpretation -- but obviously not for a billion others.

Parents should be aware that you cannot force an individual to believe in something as unseen or unknowable as the divine. But you can try to instill a feeling in a child: the sense that there is something greater in the universe they carry inside of them. It is the force of love and good and beauty and hope in the world, and it comes with responsibilities and duties.

We can look to our religious traditions to see examples of what it means to live a life of kindness, compassion, honesty and generosity, with a commitment to justice.

Seeing people do good can inspire us to do the same.

This doesn't mean that we should whitewash the role of religion in history or current events. Ideologies can be used for violent or political aims. Wars and crimes have been committed in the name of various gods. Religious institutions have used dogma to control people's lives and women's bodies.

But there are countless moments of grace inspired by the same belief in a divine creator. I'm reminded of that when my son tells me that he's given a classmate a prize he earned at school because his friend didn't have the same gadget as everyone else. I think about when my daughter makes a point to ask for a second pack of gum or another piece of candy at the store, so that she has one to give her brother.

Those everyday moments are just as important as the milestones.