At 57 years old, Greg Thomas was diagnosed with stage 4 head and neck cancer.

"When I found out that I had cancer, they told my family to go ahead and start planning my funeral."

Greg passed the hours walking his dog on a rural Minnesota road — a road that led him to a beautiful, but abandoned, church.

He began caring for the crumbling relic, scraping off a century of peeling paint.

Three years later, having added a new coat of white paint and begun work on a rotting interior, his own interior was healing too. The cancer was in remission

(WATCH the video below or READ the story from KARE-11 News)