JEH: Good morning, Kathryn
KATHRYN: Good morning, Jim.
JEH: Thank you for coming here and sitting with me today.
KATHRYN: Thank you for having me.
JEH: What is your full name?
KATHRYN: Kathryn Margaret, maiden name, Disco, like the music, D-I-S-C-O, which I got teased about, and Boisvert, so B-O-I-S-V-E-R-T. Yeah, French, and people usually say it wrong but that’s okay. And it means Greenwood, just so you know, oh, wood green because French does it kind of like backwards.
JEH: Yeah, okay. Where were you born?
KATHRYN: Out in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, which is the Berkshires, a beautiful area, and I was raised there as well.
JEH: Do you have any siblings?
KATHRYN: Yes, currently I have two sisters, and one unfortunately passed away in 1994. She was the oldest, I’m second in line, all girls. And my sister Anna lives in Minnesota, my sister Barbi lives in Manchester, Connecticut, so I’m the second of four.
JEH: Four girls, your poor dad.
KATHRYN: Well, that’s the other sad part of the story, that’s part of my testimony too. My first loss was my dad, he died of leukemia in ‘67, and so I was only in third grade, so there’s a little math for you there.
JEH: How old was he when he passed?
KATHRYN: He was only forty-seven.
JEH: Oh, I’m sorry.
KATHRYN: Yeah, very sad. But I think he loved having girls, I didn’t hear any different, I don’t think he was hemming and hawing to have a son or anything, but that was a devastating loss, yeah pretty hard.
JEH: So, did you live in any other places?
KATHRYN: No, not until I left for school, not until I left for college, I grew up literally in Pittsfield.
JEH: Okay and how about your mom?
KATHRYN: Yeah, my mom grew up in a large household, she was the only girl, right in the middle, brothers, she was the fourth one, and the rest were younger than her. And unfortunately, I found out way longer, the dots began to connect, Jim, that she was from an abusive household. There was alcohol, so my grandfather was an alcoholic, and he was an abusive alcoholic, which you don’t know when you’re hearing these things as a child, then you realize, “Huh, he did what!” So, you know, he took out the strap and he beat the boys, oh terrible.
And my mom was sort of, this is so bizarre, but my mom was like the Cinderella, that’s how she worded it. She was the one that all this work was dumped upon, and she was supposed to just like wait on everybody, bake all these pies, just ridiculous. She has a picture, I remember this picture, the stairs were gleaming beautiful, she had to wash the stairs all the time and wax them, things that just made sense to us as children.
JEH: Mm-hmm.
KATHRYN: And then I realized that, you know, my grandmother was sort of like the emotional shutdown, and my grandfather was the controlling one, so you got the typical unfortunately the classic, you know, enabling and controlling. And so my mother grew up, as not touching alcohol, but she had all those behaviors. So, then those behaviors then translated to us, and after my dad died, she became horrific, it was a very difficult household to grow up in. And unfortunately, as you know the term, the whipping boy, so I was the whipping boy, I was the child with the softest, more tender heart, and she would just abuse me verbally. We sometimes got abused physically too, yeah, if you slap somebody across the face and it hurts, I’d say that’s abuse.
So, stuff like that, you didn’t realize, you thought it was normal, you know, chase somebody around the house trying to get my sister and smack her. But it was mostly verbal abuse for me, and I literally grew up with these horrible tapes in my head, Jim, that sounded like, I believed it, you’re a child, you’re innocent, you don’t know, I’m stupid, I’m this, I’m not going to amount to a hill of beans. I mean, I was just a slower learner than my brighter sister, like older than me, and I was emotionally this way like all the time.
Because my mom would work full-time, she had to, she was trying to go to, she was doing a lot, she was trying to raise us, she was trying to go to school, get her masters, it took her ten years to do this. And by the time she would come home from school, she was a music teacher, music was a big part of our life, I’ll get to that, because that’s my testimony in there, she just had had it with children. It was the easiest but the worst job for us, but the easiest job for her because she had the same schedule that we had, summers off and so forth, is why I think is why she chose it.
JEH: Sure.
KATHRYN: So, she would come home, and we’d be like, which person are we getting today, you know what I mean.
JEH: I do.
KATHRYN: The stress was just horrendous, and she’d take it right out on us, and I was the one that responded the most emotionally I guess you would say, I cried a lot, she got me crying a lot, it was really awful.
JEH: So, it was like walking on eggshells.
KATHRYN: Exactly, perfectly put, I have said that before, it’s exactly what it was like. Yeah, it was pretty emotional.
JEH: So, your oldest sister and your two younger ones didn’t feel that stress?
KATHRYN: Well, here’s the thing, my oldest sister picked up on everything really fast, she became, you’ve probably seen this dynamic too, she became like the parent, like the pseudo parent that my mom would confide in, ask her things all the time. So, she was in a safe place. My next sister was very smart also, she could pick up on things really fast, and she knew how to manage my mom, she wasn’t emotionally wired the same way at all. And then my youngest sister, my mom lavished her attention on her, because knowing she was at the tender age of three years old at the time, having lost our dad, mom gave her special treatment. So, they were in very different positions, and I was just right there in that wrong position, you know, and a tender-hearted child like I said. So, it was a different take, we all hated the dynamics that went on, but they coped better than I did.
JEH: You mentioned you left the house at eighteen?
KATHRYN: Yeah, yeah, I did.
JEH: To go to college?
KATHRYN: Yeah, I couldn’t wait to get out, yeah.
JEH: I assume you brought all those feelings with you to college?
KATHRYN: Oh, yes, yes.
JEH: You packed them?
KATHRYN: I did, I pack them, Jim. And my religious background was just that, it was religious, we were brought up as good Catholics, knelt by the bed every night, prayed, and the ending of our prayer after dad died was, Lord, help us to do the things that daddy would want us to do, I still remember that you know. Oh, man, what a household, it was so awful.
So, I had physical problems too, you know, I mean, I just had different things where I just like all tight like that and it just really — wow, it’s weird how it can affect you all these many years later, but it was really awful, it was a hell hole. It was awful because my mom would put on a special front one way, and then everybody thought, everything is just great, and we were going through all this stuff and nobody knew what was going on.
Except for one time, my aunt, my mother’s sister-in-law came to visit. I’ll never forget, my mother must have flipped off or something, I don’t remember how this happened. She pulled us into my bedroom, and she said, “Your mom treats you like dirt under her feet.” And I was like, I was so shocked that she not only picked up on it, but that she said it in words.
She called it, you know, and I thought, why doesn’t somebody rescue us. I used to imagine, fantasize that my mom would be the one to get rid of us somehow, or that somehow, she would die, and we would go live with like my favorite cousins or something, somebody else, you know, as a rescue, just really wanted to be rescued.
But I would pray to God, I would have my rosary beads at night, I would fall asleep praying the rosary beads because I didn’t know any other way. And yet, deep down inside I said to myself, there has to be a way to know somehow, like I felt like it was too impersonal, and I did feel like I was missing something. And then there was this tract that somebody gave us to me and my sisters at the lake one day. And this is a long-ago memory, I was probably fifteen or sixteen.
JEH: A tract?
KATHRYN: A tract, you know the salvation tract, right?
JEH: I don’t.
KATHRYN: Little papers, oh, you had to have been given, you’ve never been given those? I usually have one on me. Okay, the message, the gospel message, there were a ton of them, and I’ll bring a couple just to show you, they’re wonderful.
So, we went home, and we asked my mom about it, and she was like, “Oh throw that away, throw that away.” And then we learned that to be in the Catholic Church you didn’t ask questions, even if it didn’t make sense, you didn’t ask questions.
JEH: I grew up Catholic.
KATHRYN: Okay, so you know exactly what I’m talking about. And I was just like, so right away your brain is like, something’s wrong here, why don’t we ask questions, you know.
Anyway, I wanted to get out of the house in the worst way, of course to escape this horror show, and I decided I had to pick a career basically. So, my mom was trying to guide me and help me, and I finally decided, I really didn’t know what I wanted to do, I just wanted to get out. So, I finally ended up going to Worcester, which was Worcester State, they call it Worcester University now, I think. And so this is Pittsfield, so it’s a good drive, so I’m not going to commute now, you know, I’m going to live there on campus, which is good, and I did that.
The full time I was there, what nobody knew, and now people have a name for it, the attention deficit thing, I had that going on. So, I really had horrible study habits because I just couldn’t rein it in and focus, everything going on was what I was interested in.
JEH: Everything was brand new to you also.
KATHRYN: Exactly, and I was free, and that’s the thing. Oh, yeah, that’s a big part of it. So, I was free because she, as you can imagine, I mean, I see now stepping way back, I’m a mom, I’m a grandmother, okay. So, you can step back and go, I can see why a single parent with four girls, she was really nervous and afraid, and she had to just really put her, you know, put her foot down, and very, very controlling, but also because of her background, it was an unhealthy way to control us.
So, we finally had some freedom when she would leave the house, she would go over the mountain to Tanglewood. She would go with my big sister who was like I said, kind of like the spouse. They would be out of our hair for a while, and my sister and I could go across the street, we’d hang with the neighbors and sneak back over when we saw her coming up the driveway.
JEH: And breathe.
KATHRYN: Exactly, and just decompress, oh my gosh, because the tension was just so bad, because I had stomach issues, you know, all different issues from that, which nobody ever figured out was tied into this, because again, that quiet kind of secret thing was going on in the household, which I’m sure I’m not the only one with similar circumstances.
So, anyway, getting back to going to college. So, I decided I would pick a school; I went to school, I didn’t do well because I struggled terribly, I just didn’t have good, you know, habits and so forth. But I realized that I wasn’t stupid, because I’ll never forget, one day somebody said to me, “Oh, you must have been an A student,” and I was like, what! I thought that was the most bizarre thing that anybody could have ever said to me. And I just was like, you know, that’s when I kind of stepped back and went, how many other lies have I believed about myself, wow, it was just like an eye opening.
JEH: What did you major in?
KATHRYN: I majored in the hardest one in the school, can you believe it, communication disorders, so it’s speech and audiology. So, we had to do anatomy, speech and hearing mechanism, that in itself was like, it was really, really hard.
JEH: Those are serious subjects.
KATHRYN: Really serious, difficult subjects, and I minored in psych which I found a really interesting, I loved psych. Anyway, so I managed to survive it, but here is the real turning point in my life, I was very, very depressed, I decided I wasn’t going to smoke like my roommates were smoking because they were doing weed and whatever else, and then at the last semester of my last year I said I’ll try it once.
And here’s a scary experience, I tried it once and the, what do they call the thing that’s at the bottom of the hill where everybody socializes, they have different names for it, but whatever that building is, I can’t even think what they call it. Anyway, so people are doing things in there and I was joining and then I was going to walk up to the hill where the dorms were. I could not remember the next day of even taking that walk, so that’s how high I was.
JEH: Your college days, was this during the 60’s?
KATHRYN: No, it was late 70’s, I went to school in ’76. So, that was scary, that’s when I said, I’m never doing that again, but unfortunately, I would drink every weekend like everybody else, it was just one of those things where I was just like decompressing. But as the song goes, I was looking for love in all the wrong places. So, I had relationships that were not healthy, you know, certainly not marriage material, any of the men that I dated, I mean, as you can totally fast forward and see all that, you know, as you look behind, young, stupid, that kind of thing.
JEH: Sure.
KATHRYN: I just remember saying, there’s just got to be more to life than this, this is just really the pits. The one bright light was my littlest sister, the one that I told you was three at the time, so now she’s like twelve I think, she’s writing me letters, and thank God for those letters, because they were like a lifeline, and I have said this to her since. She’s the one who lives in Connecticut, I said, Barbi, thank God you wrote these, because I was so depressed so many times, and I just felt suicidal, and I did.
And I used to imagine, like romanticizing, if you want to call it that, I was really going to tie a rock around myself and drown in the ocean or something. But I used to just think like, how could I just die without like it being painful, like I just wanted to end it, I couldn’t stand this emotional pain, there was this blackness, this darkness, and I knew, I knew I was missing something, and I know now of course it was Jesus, that’s who I was missing.
So, having drunk on these weekends, I would go to these bars, you would have to shout to hear yourself. So, I ended up abusing, and I left a big part out, my singing voice. We grew up like the Von Trapps, we all had an instrument, we all sang, we sang really well together, and we sang in public, you know, different arenas, which was a lot of fun.
That was my saving grace, I felt like the one thing I could do well was that I could sing, and I could play my guitar. And I accompanied my sisters, we did a folk song program for the town, and stuff like that, and we would do nursing homes is what we did. So, that was a lot of fun, you can imagine the older people liking young people to come in, they loved it. So, that was great, that was sort of like, hey, I did one thing right, you know.
But anyway, so here’s where this got scary, so I abused my voice by just these loud places that I was in.
JEH: Smoked filled places and such?
KATHRYN: Yes, and speaking of smoke filled, when I went to the ENT because I was losing my voice, I was like, you know who Rod Stweart is, right?
JEH: Oh, yeah.
KATHRYN: So, I began to talk like that, like my voice was going, it was awful. So, my voice was going so bad that my girlfriend says, “You better go to the ENT.” So, I go to the ENT, he examines my throat, and he literally didn’t believe me, because, you know, I guess college kids can lie. He goes, “You must smoke.” I said, no, really, I don’t smoke, I sing, that’s what I told him. When he’s looking at my throat and he’s going, “Well, it looks kind of red,” and I’m thinking, well, something’s wrong but it isn’t that.
So, he goes, “Yeah, you’ll have to have either speech therapy,” and I thought, are you serious, this is what I go to school for, I know exactly what’s going on here. He said I have vocal nodules, that was my diagnosis. So, it’s like vocal nodules, he explained it calluses here and here, it’s like a circle on your vocal chords. And it’s like a callus, rubbing all the time, and that’s where you get that what you call vocal fry, so that’s what happened.
And I was, what do I do now. And he goes, “Or we can do surgery.” And of course right away I was like, surgery, I can’t do surgery, what if I can’t sing again, it’s the only thing I have to offer. So, I’m not, I’m not even saved yet, I don’t know Jesus. So, I go home to my dorm, my girlfriend Anita, this is where God gets — My last year of my last semester, and she’s now my roommate in this dormitory of lots of girls, right. And she gives me her testimony – I’ll back up just a little bit, before I went to the doctor, she gave me her testimony of how God healed her back.
So, I believed that Jesus healed her back, but I was just like, Jesus does that now? So, I hadn’t read the bible, because you’re not encouraged to read it, you’re discouraged to read it back then. So, I thought, wow, that’s crazy, that’s cool. She goes, “Katie, do you want me and Eric to pray for you?” And I go, okay. I’m thinking, what do I have to lose, like what is that going to look like. She’s like, “We’ll just go in your room, close the door, and we’ll join hands.” Again, I hadn’t done anything like that before, it’s just like in your pew at church, right, formal.
JEH: Yes.
KATHRYN: So, we prayed. Oh my gosh, I still remember it, I know exactly the day this happened, it was February 24th, 1980, and I was blown away because I could feel this power and I could feel this and hear this voice for the first time, say to me, “Now, go get your guitar and try to sing,” just like that. Now, I know that was the Lord speaking to me. So, I was like, I’m going to go and get my guitar and I’m going to sing.
And previous to that I could barely talk, so I could not sing a note, nothing was going to come out. So, anyway, I’m like singing like whatever, whatever came out, and my voice is like [At this point, Kathryn hits a beautiful high note] way up here. And my friends are hearing a vibration, you could just feel it, we felt the power of the Holy Spirit, that’s what was going on, it was just, it was a dramatic, just like that I got healed. I just got the chills. I got healed supernaturally and many other physical times the Lord has healed me, I mean, many times. I said to them, did you, “Yeah, we heard that.” They’re like, “Oh, my gosh.”
So, anyway they explained the gospel message, and that part’s a little foggy to me because I was so much on overload, I think. I’m like, are you serious? When I walked in, I could hardly talk, now I can sing and talk, this is a miracle, and I knew it for what it was, a miracle, oh Lord. The Lord heals, amen to that, doesn’t he ever, right. So, I was so excited you could not shut me up; I told everybody I could tell, and everybody knew I was struggling with this, everybody that knew me.
So, my girlfriend Colleen, who lived up on the second floor, in the same building, she comes downstairs, I tell her, Colleen, listen to this. She’s like, “What happened to you?” So, I tell her, she received Jesus too. So, I left that important part out, they explained the gospel, I surrendered my life to the Lord and received him. I didn’t really have a real clue what that meant, except I knew that the way I was living had to be worse than the way I wanted to live, which had to be an improvement this way.
After the miraculous healing of my voice, my friend encouraged me to go back to my ENT to give testimony. So, I had him look at my throat and he said, “It looked fine,” and asked me, “What did you do?” Then I told him, my friends prayed and asked Jesus to heal me. He just sort of turned sideways, wrote something in his chart and said, “Well, whatever you’re doing, just keep it up.” I remember walking out looking up at the sky and saying to the Lord, now I will not sing for my credit or glory, I will only sing for Your glory! I felt that if God gave me this gift, restored my voice, I wanted to give it back to him to honor Him.
JEH: Praise God.
KATHRYN: So, the first song the Lord gave me, and he dropped it into my head literally, I still remember where I sat in this apartment, where we lived, Dan and I, and this pad of paper, which I’m skipping, I’ll get back to that. And I just remember writing this down, it’s called, Nothing else matters, and it’s still up here. And I was able to grab a hold of the chords and just write this song. And it was about showing my love and appreciation because Jesus is my Lord and I know he’s in control, and he loves me unconditionally. Basically that’s the message in the song.
JEH: So, now you’ve found Jesus.
KATHRYN: YES!!!!!
JEH: You’re telling everyone that will listen.
KATHRYN: Everyone that will listen, you wouldn’t have been able to shut me up, I was glowing with the Holy Spirit.
JEH: So, then you graduate from college.
KATHRYN: Yep, barely, by the skin of my teeth, yeah. I graduate college and I have to decide what to do for work. And in the meantime, the coolest thing happened, a friend of mine who brought me to work, I worked at UMASS Medical, I worked in the x-ray file room, where I didn’t need prior experience.
Oh, I should pause and say, I did not want to go to the next level of college, because I realized that I’m just not a student, like this is just horrible for me. And I would have had to have my master’s to actually use this profession to make it work, and I was not interested.
So, I hooked up with this girlfriend named Karen, and she brought me back and forth, and she says, “Hey, I have a question, would you like to go to a church where they’re having a special, it was a play, and it was a drama, and it was a musical all in one, and it shows the gospel.” And I said, oh, that sounds interesting, and she says, “Because I know you’re musical, you would enjoy that, right?” I said, I would love to go, let’s go. So, we went to one of the shows, it was called, The Team, and it originated out of Oxford, Mass, this guy named Vinny Rideout actually created the whole thing, and then he recruited people after praying for which one for this part and so forth.
So, that’s where I met my husband, he was doing the lights, he doesn’t do any singing or acting. You probably picked this up, he’s quiet, he’s an introvert, and I’m the extrovert, big surprise on that one, right. So, I met him there and I decided that, hah, that’s kind of interesting.
Dan and I started dating, and within something like three months we knew right away that we were meant to be together. So, we’ve been together, it will be forty-two years in June, praise God. I married my soul mate, I’m telling you, I look at him, I was so close to making the wrong choice, thank God for the Holy Spirit. Because He is just guiding me, He’s guiding me, if I’m willing to listen, He’s guiding me, you know.
JEH: I’m so glad you shared that, that’s fantastic.
KATHRYN: As Christians we have to listen to the Lord, He knows the best plan for us. We can’t just assume and think because it looks right, we really have to listen to the Lord, He’s trying to prevent calamity in some cases maybe.
JEH: How many children do you have?
KATHRYN: Two girls. Sadly, the other part of my story, a lot of loss, the thread of loss is all through my life. We lost our third child; I was five and a half months pregnant.
JEH: I’m so sorry.
KATHRYN: It was just devastating. So, we lost that third child, she would be twenty-seven this summer. So, it would have been all girls, but we have Leah, who now lives in Ohio with her husband happily with four children. So, my first grandchildren are all her four, and then my second daughter is married to her husband happily, Melissa and just had her second child, both girls. We have all granddaughters. Girls only granddaughters and I grew up with sisters, so I said, maybe the Lord knew I couldn’t handle boys.
JEH: How long have you been coming to Harvest?
KATHRYN: Let’s see, I think since 2009 I would say. It hardly seems like that could be that long, but, yes, I believe 2009.
JEH: And obviously you like Harvest Community Church?
KATHRYN: Very much. The word of God is preached so solid, no compromise, oh, yes. You know, if you’re going to be a Christian that long, you can only stay in a church, which was the prior church, nothing to say against the minister, loved the guy, great guy, and shepherd, you know. But after a while, I became to feel like the last couple of years that we were there, I said, I’m not growing, I’m not feeling like we’re going to the next level to really preach at a level that, I felt like something was missing there. So, eventually I talked to Dan about it, and we both agreed, it’s probably time to move on, so we did.
JEH: Were there any emotional triggers from your childhood that followed you during your walk with Jesus?
KATHRYN: Yes, I would say, yes, it was being over-sensitive to different situations because I was criticized, that was the biggest fear at work and my home, was I was criticized about this and that, you know, I couldn’t do anything right. And even if Dan would make a statement that normal people would say was constructive, I would take it to heart, like it would wound, it would wound, it’s old wounds. So, yes, they’re sure there.
So, friendships have been all over the place, rocky with different ones. I would find somebody that I thought would want to be a friend with, and I would kind of get close too soon, instead of realizing that there’s steps to that, that’s the best way to put it. It took me years to figure out that this is just not the best way to do this, because some people are extremely needy, and you don’t want to be their hero, you don’t want to be their savior, you don’t want to be the one to rescue them. So, rescue and control I think are the other parts of that too, to the alcoholic disfunction thing.
JEH: Yes.
KATHRYN: So, my mom being second generation, maybe third generation alcoholic, you know, we grew up with those behaviors without even knowing what those behaviors were. So, yes, that would be a big yes to that. And I still struggle with that today, I still struggle with certain relationships. I think, how many times am I going to make this mistake, Lord? So, it’s all about the Holy Spirit renewing you, renewing your mind, renewing your thoughts, and it’s a healing process and it’s step by step, I guess.
JEH: Did you feel that you deserved your place in this world, or did you feel less than because of any alcohol from your childhood?
KATHRYN: Well, yeah, definitely, less than. Like, everyone was more talented and smarter, very little self-esteem, because of being criticized so much.
The Lord reminded me of something I need to add, very important, my cancer testimony, big one, wow.
JEH: The floor is yours.
KATHRYN: Oh, my gosh, that’s a big one, I got the chills again, the Holy Spirit showing up big time. So, the gift that the Lord showed me I have is evangelizing, I love to talk about Jesus, it super charges me to do that.
JEH: It shows.
KATHRYN: I feel like, I just get instantly energized, like I plug right into the wall, I love it, praise God. So, here is the situation, I had gone for my mammogram the year before, I’m supposed to go on a regular basis. So, I didn’t go that year, then I heard this niggling, again, that Holy Spirit, I really hear him, and I’m not bragging, I’m just saying, He’s so gracious, you know what I mean. And he’s niggling at me and niggling at me and so like at the end of that summer, He goes, “You didn’t go last fall for your mammogram, you need to go.” Fine, Lord, I’ll go.
Well, they discovered I had cancer in one breast. So, I would have never found it, it wasn’t the type you could do on a self-exam, only show up on an x-ray. So, the doctor looked at the x-ray, he holds them up, he goes, “Usually I see this on both sides,” and I was like, thank you, Jesus.
And my next thing that went through my head very fast was, wow, if I have cancer, just think of all the people I can witness to. And this is what I’m thinking, they’re going to be a captive audience, because if they’re doing a test, and they’re doing my treatments and all this other stuff, where are they going to go, they can’t go anywhere, they’ve got to listen, I love it.
So, I just remember crying. I was like, so how many treatments do I have to have of chemo? “Eight.” What, and I just cried and cried, eight treatments, I’ll lose my hair, you know. But the Lord was so gracious through those eleven months. I ended up having to have a mastectomy on one side, so it’s one side, thank God, not two, and then the chemo started right before Christmas, December 15th.
And then it went into the next year, and I was done in five and a half months, I’d go every three weeks. And in those times the Lord was so gracious. I had friends through my old church, the one that we left, set up mealtimes, so every three weeks when I was at my lowest with the chemo, you know, you can’t be near people, you can get an infection. They didn’t just bring meals, they brought gifts, overwhelmed us with love from the Lord, overwhelmed us with love from the Lord.
It was just a wonderful, special time, and my girls got to really witness, this is what Christian love looks like. You know, even if you don’t know this person that you’re making a meal for, you’re the body of Christ, this is how we watch out for one another. And so it was just a witness to anybody else that was in my family for five and a half months, that was amazing.
And actually the night that I had my mastectomy, I said to the Lord, I don’t know what this is going to be like, I want to be in my hospital room all by myself, and I feel like he said, “Oh, come on, Kathryn, that’s not you at all, you know I’m going to give you somebody.” You know, in so many words, he was saying to me, I’ve already prepped you for this person to come into your room. So, this woman came into my room as my roommate. I told her about Jesus, and I led her to Christ right there that night.
JEH: Wow.
KATHRYN: Incredible, that was all the Lord, right. Glory to God, whoooo! I’ll never forget that that was really, really cool. And then a year and a half later I had reconstruction surgery, so more opportunities. It was like more opportunities kept happening to that. I really believe it was the Lord, through the drugs, through the doctors, through the caring, I mean, the nurturing, my husband was great, my children were great. They were thirteen and eleven at the time, so they were very, very helpful.
I understand that that’s why we’re on this earth, and Pastor Gene just said that; didn’t he?
JEH: Yes.
KATHRYN: This is why we’re here, we’re not here to please ourselves, we’re not here, as Dan would say, even to have a happy marriage, “That’s really not why we’re in marriage.” We’re in marriage to show the relationship between Christ and the church. And it’s supposed to be holy and pure and exclusive. It’s like your eyes are opened. I’ll never forget the day he said that; he’s such a wise man, he’s like, “We’re really not in this marriage to be happy,” that’s not supposed to be the primary, is what I’m trying to say. It’s great if we are, it’s great for content, but we are going to have iron sharpens iron, which I’m sure you know.
JEH: I do.
KATHRYN: I have a lot of testimonies, I just happen to, praise God. I wish somebody would write a book for me, because I don’t know the first thing about writing a book, and I do have a lot of relatable situations that people could say, yes, that’s how God can work in your life.
JEH: Well, I think we might be at the right place for you to tell us.
KATHRYN: Yes.
JEH: So, I’m going to encourage you to continue.
KATHRYN: Okay, another praise, this is cool, this goes way back to when Dan and I were first married, we were living in that apartment, before we moved from Worcester to Blackstone, where he built the house. I had something going on my foot, on my right foot, right under here. Ow, what is this? So, I went to the foot doctor and all these little dots, black dots, plantar warts, they’re horrific, you can’t get rid of those things. So, they were really painful, and I was going for treatments, and the treatments were awful. And so Dan and my friend at the time, Linda Lee, who said to me, “We’ll pray that Jesus will take them away,” because they already knew that Jesus healed me once, and they had the faith to pray that, the Lord is a healer.
So, we prayed for that, and then I start gradually looking, and the Lord is uprooting these things, and the Lord is literally lifting these out. They never came back, isn’t that crazy! They never came back, that was the Lord.
JEH: Amen.
KATHRYN: I have another one, I’ve got to tell you another one. It blows my mind how specific God was to this situation. So, I’m in the car, I’m at my mailbox, all of a sudden, I reach back to put your seat belt on. Oh, what is that pain, it was like a sharp, oh my gosh, and all I could think of, I don’t know if the Lord told me or I heard it, I thought, frozen shoulder, it felt like frozen shoulder.
So, I call my doctor, she says, “Let’s send you to physical therapy.” So, I go into Milford for physical therapy. We do all these different things, you know, this, that, and the other thing, and I don’t remember what all of them were. The physical therapy was unsuccessful. So, my doctor says, “We can do one or two things, we can either medicate you so that you won’t feel it, we can manipulate it.” And I thought, that sounds painful, and you’ll feel it after. She says, “We can do cortisone shots.” Right away, I’m like, no.
I said, I’m going to ask the Lord about this, that’s what I told her. And I still am like that, I tell people, this is who I’m going to ask, I’m going to ask the Lord. I don’t want them to think that I made the decision by myself, or that I’m a good person or any of that stuff, I want to glorify the Lord. So, I’m asking the Lord, I go home, He says, “Keep doing this thing,” you know, over the door like that; I’m doing that.
And then one day, it’s the winter, January or February, and we have a wood stove, so we have a wood pile, a barrel, bring it in, an area to place it. So, think about it, it’s exercise right. So, I’m thinking, should I do this, Lord? And He’s like, “Do it, and if it hurts, don’t it.” I feel like He said, “go do it.” Well lo and behold, the motion of doing that, what am I doing, I’m doing therapy. The pain went away, I don’t know how many days it was, the pain went away completely, and that was the Holy Spirit. Because He said to me, “You will not go conventional means.” Now, I don’t talk like that, I don’t know about you, I don’t talk like that. So, I knew it was the Lord. So, I’m not going to do it the conventional way, I’m not going to do what the doctor said, I’m going to do what the Lord says. So, he told me that this is so cool. I said to Dan, I’m healed, I’m healed, I’m healed.
So, when people tell me they’re having a medical issue, and they’ve tried all these things, I say, did you ask the Lord about it, because the Lord may have a non-conventional method for you. And I don’t know who I might be talking to, maybe somebody in church some day with this testimony. The Lord is so specific, he knows our bodies. It’s Psalm 139: I am fearfully and wonderfully made, he’s made every part of our bodies, he knows exactly what the functions are and what needs to be done about it.
JEH: Is there anything else you would like to add to this incredible redemption story of yours?
KATHRYN: I wanted to wrap up with this, I knew it was important. At the end of my mother’s life, toward the end of my mother’s life, we made amends. Well, even before the very end. So, she began to realize that my Christianity was a lifestyle, not like a fly by night. First of course, I got persecuted at my home, you know, in a small way, not compared to other people. Like she was mad when I brought the bible to Catholic Church, you just don’t do that, you know.
But eventually she watched me become a mother, and mother my children, become a wife. And I was the only one, sadly of my sisters that stayed married, the other ones divorced, and one passed away before she was planning to divorce her husband. But my mother saw consistency with that, and I think she saw that a Christian marriage looks different than a non-Christian marriage. And so that’s glory to God again.
And I just remember having a relationship with her, and like I said, the path of least resistance, not like put her in her place. But I felt like in this one instance I had to, so I did over the phone politely but firmly, and she was kind of ticked, and then at the end she said, “Well, I’m glad we had this talk.” That was the closest she was ever going to come to apologizing, which is what the Lord told me. I had Dan praying in the next room, even the girls too, I think they knew. So, I had everyone praying, so that was good.
And then we turned a corner in our relationship. She realized that she was controlling down to ridiculous things. So, at the end of her life I would continue of course to try to her about the Lord, and point different things out without insulting her Catholicism, and yet I had to point out the truth to her. And at the end of her life, I’d continue of course to try to tell her about the Lord. At the end of her life she had undergone, which we think is like a mini-stroke, because she couldn’t speak for an extended time.
And I was going to visit her in Minnesota, which is where she was living in the nursing home, next to my sister, who originally had her living with her, and then she placed her in a home, she started with dementia. So, she’s in her eighty’s by now, she’s eighty-seven. And I’m like, Lord – I’m in the plane like praying, my Lord, this might be the last time I see her, I just sensed, you know, this is going to be the last time I see her, I really need to, I really need to try to bring her to Christ, if you tell me she’s at that point, you know, but she’s not talking, okay, so this is really interesting. Again, I get the chills.
So, my sister says, “Okay, you’ll have your time with her, we do a little music and the people around us do whatever, they had a guitar there, that was fun. And then my sister all of a sudden says, she’s got to bring her dog to the dog appointment. I’m like, wait a minute, this is a set-up, this is the Lord. So, the Lord’s trying to get me alone with my mother, so I realized that’s what it is.
So, I tell her I love her, I bring her in the room, and I was telling her about the Lord, and I was hearing the Lord say, “Say the prayer of repentance for her so that if she wants to say it, she can say it in her heart, she doesn’t need to use words.” So, I did that, and then all of a sudden, she looks past me and she goes, — I go, what, what do you see, mom? And she smiled and she couldn’t say the words, and I thought, I don’t know if we were being visited by the Lord, the Holy Spirit or an angel, but I think she saw something supernatural.
And then right after that, she started with a one-word sentence, two-word sentence. In the space of I think an hour, by the time it got to the end, she was in her bed, I went over to her bed, I told her I loved her, I had to leave pretty soon, my nephew was going to come and pick me up and bring me back to their house. And she goes, “I love you girls so much.” I guess it was six words. And I was like, wait until I tell my sister, she’s speaking again. And I was just, it was for that time and place, like frozen in time, the Lord needed to accomplish that for a purpose.
And so I got on the plane, and I thought, like the Lord said, you finish your assignment, right. So, she passed away five or six months later, and when I got the news, I said, Lord, I just need to know – He says, “Go turn on the K-LOVE radio set, it’s a Christian radio. So, I turn on the Christian radio, they finish what they were saying, and they played, I Can Only Imagine. And right away, the Lord said, my mother’s going to be in heaven, I’m going to see her someday, thank you, Jesus. And so that is very dramatic too and really cool. But that’s the beauty of this whole thing, we had just gradually made steps toward healing.
There was one point in time where I actually dumped my feelings on her one time, in a good and healthy was, and I was crying. And she goes, “I had no idea.” And she didn’t, she had no idea, and she apologized. So, I think I heard her apologize maybe once, maybe twice in my whole lifetime, her lifetime. But it was just so healing, so God again. How does this ever happen, only the Holy Spirit.
JEH: Only the Holy Spirit.
KATHRYN: Only the Holy Spirit, so God is amazing. That’s where I think can end, that’s the last story that I think would be significant.
JEH: Thank you so much for sitting and telling me and letting yourself be vulnerable.
KATHRYN: Oh, you’re welcome. You know, I remember praying and saying, Lord, I want to be a very different parent, I want to be the parent to my children that I wish I would have had for me. And again, a beautiful thing, the Lord managed that. I didn’t abuse my children, he’d stop me and be like, “Watch that, watch what you’re saying.” And I’d be like, Lord, I give you complete permission to show me how to parent my children.
And I had a really godly woman, a friend at the time, much older than me, probably old enough to be my mother at the time. And she said, “You know, it’s a miracle that you’re the mother you are, we know that’s the Lord.” I said, I know, because I didn’t end up abusive, the cycle stopped there, and that’s a huge testimony too, I’m very close to both my girls, we have this lovely growing beautiful relationship in the Lord, they’re both born again and spirit filled. God has redeemed it, because all the pain and all the hurt that I went through, He’s redeemed it through my children and my grandchildren.
JEH: Halleluiah Jesus.
KATHRYN: Right, isn’t that cool?
JEH: Thank you so much, Kathryn.
KATHRYN: You’re welcome, thank you for asking me because I just knew that somebody probably hopefully will be encouraged.
JEH: Oh, I’m sure they will.
KATHRYN: Yeah.