So let love be repreated...

"There's no hope without love. There's no love without His grace. So many hungry souls without smiles on their faces. Distant hearts in familiar places. Now there's One who's come to take the emptiness we share, so let us live in this Kingdom.

So let love be repeated, so unchanging, freely given, always needed - love repeated. And let Christ be received in our hearts, in our homes, in our streets, and in our lives - loved repeated.

Yo, when I think about true love it's always repeated. Even the strongest man in the whole world he needs it. From Pope Benedict to the soldiers in Iraq, from the athlete to the shack to the child on his momma's back. It's like wind to the sailboat, gas to the car, energy to the runner who dares to go far. Each one, reach one there's so much to do and if I stop I drop and God's love will continue.

Now there's one who's come to take the emptiness we share so let us live in His Kingdom.

So let love be repeated, so unchanging, freely given, always needed - love repeated. And let Christ be received in our hearts, in our homes, in our streets, in our lives - Love Repeated."

~"Love Repeated" Jon Niven and Fr. Norm Fisher - CHWC Theme Song 2009

Love repeated - Theme of CHWC 2009 and boy did that hit home for me. For this whole year so far love has been hard. No that's a lie - for a really really long time (as long as I can remember) love has been a difficult thing. Which is kinda crazy and I am confused by as I love love! I love giving love! I love TO love. I WANT to be loved. I CAN'T seem to accept and receive love comfortably. In my family - we are not the touchy feely type. We don't hug, we rarely show any forms of affection for each other. We are not a family that says "I love you" when we hang up the phone or when we leave. In my 28 years of life - I can count on 1 hand the number of times I've heard "I love you" said to me from my parents. I've never heard it from my brother. When my grandfather on my dad's side got sick I told him I loved him out loud for the first time. We occasionally say it now. I know my family loves me. My parents write it on my bday cards and Christmas cards. My dad will end a text to me now with "luv u." But I secretly long to hear I LOVE YOU, all three words strung together at once, from a parent (especially my mom) and my brother. The more I look into myself and my life - I think this is the catalyst to my bad decision makings in my early twenties when it came to boys. I so badly wanted to feel loved and have affection (did I mention we're not a huggie/touchy feely family?) that I turned a blind eye to the reality of my relationships. I was 20 dating a man who was 30. His wife just left him for her ex who just got released from jail (WHAT WAS I THINKING?!!!) I was young, I was smitten, I soooo badly wanted to be married already! So we started hanging out, which turned into much more very quickly. Boy was I dumb looking back on that - I was like a prize - I was taken advantage of. We were "together" for 3 years. He cheated on me with his best friends wife - OUCH. To this day he won't admitt that he was actually cheating on me when I broke up with him. You'll be happy to know - he's still with her today. Yay for them (can you hear the sarcasm in my tone?) Anyways, this led me into not wanting to care anymore when it came to boys. I didn't trust either. I am still struggling with trust. I put up HUGE walls with boys now too. I give very little of my heart away. It's hard for me to be vulnerable and to open up. I think this is one reason why I love YM and teens. I can be vulnerable with them - open up - share my life stories and how God works in my life - and not worry about being hurt by them in the end. But if I'm vulnerable with a guy I like - he will in the end break my heart right? (that's how I think now.) So I am trying not to fall into this trap. I fall into this trap with God a lot. I tell Him what I think He WANTS to hear. I pray like I think He WANTS me to pray. So at CHWC Boston this year - I decided I needed to change all that thinking. If I really truly wanted to learn to love me and let others love me for me... I first had to let God love me and know me. Each night at program CHWC had a section called Real Life. Questions flashed across the screen for the intro. Questions like: Who's the REAL you? What masks are you hiding behind? If you took them off would your friends like you? Would you like you? Who knows the REAL you? These questions struck a huge chord in me. I found myself Monday night with tears running down my cheeks as I sat in program and watched this intro. That night I prayed to God to help me be me - the real Kathleen Megan Deasy. Be careful what you pray for - cause BAM... He sure broke me down that week for me to see the real me... Broken. Each day I had an internal battle of all the thoughts going through my head and wanting to work on that - but also wanting to stuff everything and focus only on the work at hand. On Thursday night I had a complete major breakdown - or what I like to call - a come apart. I had been holding back tears all day. Little ones here and there would come out. But I had to be the in control person on Thursday cause my Director was struggling herself. So Thursday night comes amd it's been a long and stressful day with it's ups and downs - a legit emotional roller coaster ride. I was sitting in the office chatting with Cory and my cell rings and it's Brenna. Out of nowhere I hear her voice and i begin to sob. And sob is an understatement friends. I ended up on the floor of my room in fetal position hyperventilating with snot just running out of my nose - uncontrollably crying. I couldn't talk, I could barely breath... just sobbing. For a good 90 minutes or so. Jon P came to check on me... I remember him standing in my doorway. I was a jerk and didn't even really acknowledge him (sorry Jon). He sent me a sweet text tho - saying he was headed to bed, that he loves me, praying for me and if I needed him to come get him - if not he'd chat with me in the AM. (thanks Jon! that meant a lot!) Anyways - Brenna just sat on the other end of the phone and told me to just let it out and it was ok. I don't even know if I really even told her anything that was going on... just cried and cried. I don't think I could have done that with anyone other than Brenna. That was my bottom. I woke up on Friday AM surprisingly feeling a little lighter and less weight of the world on my shoulders. I had cried myself to sleep and while praying after I got off the phone with Bren - I remember yelling at God and being really really angry with Him. It was the beginning of being real with Him. I remember praying that I was so angry that He had me go through this major surgery and He left me. He left me to feel worse off now than before the surgery. He left me and I felt so alone. I had lost my best friend of excess weight to hide behind and now He had gone away too. But Friday AM at closing Mass - God spoke to me through the theme song (which I had heard every night that week.) The words to that song felt like Jesus singing directly to me. Telling me that He loves me - but if I'm not willing to accept that, believe that and see that - then there's no hope. That I'm surrounded by His love - but I need to be open to it to see it. He's with me - He's never left me. I've just been blind to it. He's here to take my emptiness away. I need to receive the love that is being repeated TO ME - freely given TO ME. I had to open my heart and let Him in. So I did. I prayed at Mass that my heart was His. And honestly - it hasn't been super easy since then - but much easier than I had thought. God's definitely making me do a lot of work. He's challenging me to deepen my prayer life. He's put me in many situations that I have had to completely rely on Him. But I'm trusting - and if I can fully trust Jesus then I can't go wrong right? So step one is to receive Christ's love fully. Now we're beginning the receiving other's love fully too... I think that one's gonna be much harder...

Unpacking the bottom of my closet

So I've figured that it's best to begin from the beginning (well beginning of figuring my lowest points out) to make these last 4 months or so of my crazy journey to make the most sense! So I take you back to just after my post from May. About 2-3 weeks after that post I made the deaded phone call to my PCP to be referred to a Therapist. Kira is her name. I was very skeptical in the beginning about going back to therapy. I hadn't been since high school and i really was struggling with that therapy is not spiritual and spiritual direction is not therapy and I really felt like i needed the two to become one. So I went in to my first session with some big walls up already! But Kira put me at ease right away and she was so nice that I said to myself that I really can't be a jerk to her! lol! So we chatted about why I was seeking therapy and what i felt like I needed to work on. The funny thing now is that yea I really want to work on body image and all these changes i'm going through, but through talking about my past - i can't even get to that yet because of all the unpacking of past luggage that's just been thrown to the bottom of my closet and covered up by years of stuff. It's been a little painful at times. I've admitted to occurances in my past that I've never spoken out loud. I've said the most honest things about how I really feel and how things truly effect me. I've learned that I have a lot of negative in my life and not much positive love and support from those closest to me. I've learned that I am a stuffer (I knew that already!) I'm learning that some of the things that have happened to me in my life and have caused me hurt and pain are not my fault. I've learned that my mother plays a huge role in my life and not neccesarily a positive role - that doesn't mean I don't love my mom and that my mom doesn't love me - but we have a unique relationship and one that comes with much baggage and my constant trying to please her doesn't help me. I've had many a "awakening" moments - or the "ah ha" moments where I've made the connection to why I've done something or the why to how I reacted. Sometimes they haven't been good reasons - but ones to help me understand myself a little better and to be able to better myself. I'm beginning to learn how to receive love. I'm beginning, very slowly, to learn how to love me. That's the hardest. It's hard to love yourself when you think of yourself as no good, dirty, and usable. But I'm beginning to change those thoughts as I continue to think through and process and confront the reality of being sexually abused as a child by a babysitter. I know this is new information about me to all of my friends who read this. It's one of those skeleton's in my closet that I've never felt comfortable sharing with anyone - including family. I was/am ashamed of what happened and for allowing it and for actually when I was little not seeing anything wrong with it. I thought it's what my awesome babysitter wanted to do and she was wicked fun and I loved having her babysit - I didn't even think it was strange. But that's a little kids mind for ya! Once I was older and realized how wrong it was - I was too ashamed and scared to say anything so I just packed it up nice and tightly and hid it deep down far away in my closet and made myself forget it was there. And for many years I did forget about it... if it did cross my mind - I pushed it right back down and out. It wasn't until my early 20's it came storming back - right around the sexual abuse scandal in Boston actually. The first time I went to PGC (virtus) training i remember being so uncomfortable during it and couldn't get my childhood memories out of my head. But I did what I do best and hid it again and stuffed it. It wasn't until really about a year ago that the thoughts and feelings began creeping up again. And really it's been since this past February that it's on my mind a lot. I think it's because I know deep down that I need to deal with it because it has effected my life greatly and has effected relationships and how I think of myself. So I'm working through the hurt and beginning to heal. The exciting part is that really this "non-religious" therapy is actually making my prayer life stronger and my realtionship with God even deeper. I have many awakenings in sessions that I get to bring to God and God and I together work on the healing. I know God has big hands around my heart... he's holding it and picking up the pieces - not as quickly as I'd like... and sometimes it's painful to be put back together... but I feel His hands in the process. I know He's changing my heart as well as He glues it back together. He's helping it to be more open to others and to others love. He's helping it to love others better too. And along with all that... I'm able to love Him more and more each day too as I am fully relying on Him.

Continuing on my Journey...

WOW! I didn't realize it had been almost 3 months since my last post and boy did I leave you all hanging!! Sorry about that! It has been a whirlwind of a few months. I have my ups and my downs, but I wake up each day thankful and hopeful. I have much to blog about and will over the next few days blog all the happenings since my last post. Here are some highlights:

I have officially lost over 100 pounds... (108 to be exact!) When i stand on the scale and see that I am out of the 200's I still do a double take. I still really don't believe it. And I still only see 293 pound Kate in the mirror... but I am beginning to notice differences each day and I am beginning the long journey of learning to love me.

Thanks to wonderful friends like Margo and Scott I have headed back to therapy! So far this has proven to be a wonderful experience... yet an emotional one as I have LOTS to unpack. More on this soon...

Margo and I had dinner a little after my last post and she said something very profound to me that I think about, pray about and try to wrap my head around every day. She told me that she had been praying about me (thanks! I can use all the prayers I can get!). She said that she knows how much I want to be a mom and give birth. She said that she wonders if this is God's way of answering this prayer right now in my life... giving birth to me. I'm going through all these changes and it has it's ups and downs and it's not easy and not quick... but I will soon give birth to a "new" Kate... shedding of my old. I kinda chuckled it off when she first told me and didn't really talk with her much about it. But boy did it rock my world. Every day I think about this... It's a pretty profound way of thinking and one I am working through with God!

Catholic Heart Workcamp (CHWC) Boston this year was a doozie but as I am a month out from that week and getting to look back and reflect upon it - it was a week full of blessings for many - myself included. CHWC Boston was my rock bottom. Yes it was kinda bad timing for God to throw me into a complete and utter emotional shutdown. But as I look back on that week it was good timing just because of the wonderful people who I was surrounded by. If my rock bottom had hit any other week I would have hid in my room and done it myself. Now I'm not saying I did a very good job of leaning on those around me... I still shut down and turned inward... but just having wonderful people and friends around me was comfort. Knowing that Scott was on campus all week and getting to see him and get a Scott hug every morning and his awesome positive smile and hello's each afternoon when he returned. Knowing if I needed him I could find him. Seeing his face in all the adult meetings towards the end of the week when things got super stressful - it was calming to me. Having Cory and Jon P at camp all week was also so comforting. Although I never did get a chance to sit down and catch up with them (or pray with Cory - sorry Mama Heimann... I was really hoping I would be able to but the timing was just off... I'll make a date with Cory when he's back up for retreats!) Having Brenna back in the states and just a phone call away... having her just sit on the other end of the line while I sobbed... that's a true friend sent by God. I had people around me ready and willing to pick me up and help put the pieces back together. And that's the part I am working on now... putting my pieces back together.

CHWC Charleston with my teens from St. John's was another week of blessings! My CHWC black cloud followed me this year however and we had a Swine Flu outbreak - but it was a wonderful week! It was a week of God showing himself to me in many different ways. It was a week of awakenings and beginning of some healing for me. (I have a whole post I want to post about this week!)

My little venture to NYC last week was wonderful and again full of God showing himself to me. He's really gently working with me to become comfortable with who I am, who He wants me to be, and with this new body of mine! For the first time since I can remember as a little girl, I was picked up and swung around! Andy Cloninger (CHWC musician) was the musician in New Jersey at camp. I haven't seen him in a year! He was told that I had lost a bunch of weight and that he may not recognize me (I don't think it's that drastic... but I look at me everyday!) So when I arrived at camp and say Andy he came running over to me and gave me a huge hug and picked me up and swung me around. Now I as SUPER uncomfortable with this... yet a little giddy too!! I mean... someone picked me up - easily - without breaking their back!! But i am still really self conscious... I was quick to wanting Andy to put me down! lol!!

I am currently in Springfield, MA at the RE Convocation. I have a heavy heart and lots to still work out with God. So much on my mind that I haven't been getting much sleep cause I can't make my mind stop. But having some good prayer time. This whole process has really strengthened my relationship with Christ - waaayyy more than i ever thought it would!

That's the basic overall update... more to come over the next few days... I promise I won't keep you hanging on! I've got lots on my mind to share... just need some time to put it all down!

Oh yea... and there's this boy.... ;)