Time to Reflect
Time to reflect,
Each day as I go through the routine and the unexpected that encompasses life, I take time to pray. Usually these days, those prayers consist of repetitive, memorized, Our Fathers, Hail Marys, Grace Before Meals; or reading Scripture passages. Infrequently in the past 2 months have I sat in what Matthew Kelly would call the “classroom of silence” and just placed myself in the presence of God and opened myself up to what He wanted me to know. Why have I avoided this precious time with My Father? Because I do not want to think about what is going on. If I can avoid “thinking” too much, I can allow myself to forget what has happened, where we are now, and what lies ahead. It keeps everything neat and tidy and running smoothly. I’m terrible at it. This is all too big to push into a back corner of my mind, and in reality, it is too important to do that as well. So, today, I sat in His presence, I spent some carefree timelessness with God and realized through His wisdom, that time is what this all comes down to. We all want Catie cured, because it will mean that we will have more time with her. It will mean that we will have more time together as a family instead of being separated. It will mean more time for Christine and I to be together as a married couple. Just fix this God, and we will have the time to do all of the things together that we always wanted to do. Just give us more time God, and we promise, we will never waste it again.
How many seconds, minutes, days, even years of this most precious gift of time have we frittered away in anger or remorse or passionless living. For my part, I know that there are too many lost moments to count, too many moments given over to regret or worry. Jesus gave us such a wonderful example of using time correctly. Make the best of every moment you have. Touch the lives and hearts of the people you are with. Make a difference by your presence in someone else’s life. When a person leaves after an encounter with me, I should be asking myself, “is that person better off as a result of encountering me?” If the answer is no, I have some work to do. If the answer is I don’t know, I really have some work to do. Catie’s uncertain future has awakened a passion for life in me. I want to spend every minute with her for fear that I may not have the limitless supply of days that I had counted on. I also want to spend every minute with Christine, and the other kids, and family, and friends, and people I have not seen in years, who have reached out in response to Catie’s story. Do you know that there is a place where I can do that, spend every moment with everyone I know, it is called heaven, and the longing for that connectedness and the desire to spend time with each other was placed in our hearts by a God who loves us enough to provide us with our very own GPS. If we follow that desire to be with and to love and to care for and minister to the people in our lives, that very same desire will lead us home to a place where the desire will be fulfilled for eternity. I love God for that!
Back to the present. Catie is through 16 of the 30 radiation treatments which should put her back in Mechanicsburg the last week of August. So the first “save the date” on the calendar will most likely be Thursday August 28th, Friday August 29th or Saturday August 30th for the Welcome Home Parade. The next date will be September 14th for the event at the Valley Forge Convention Center being organized by the Brady girls from St Al’s. For the Jersey folks, save September 27th for an event at St James in Basking Ridge, (site of Catie’s baptism, Christine and my wedding, and where we met 32 years ago). November 15th is the date for the race in Mechanicsburg. And finally, November 21st, there is a dinner dance at St Columbkill in Boyertown. We will continue to update you on each of these as we have information. One note on the event in Basking Ridge. If there is anyone who has a timeshare that they would like to offer as a silent auction item, please contact Sean at \n sean.closkey@trfund.com
Catie and Christine had another good day. The radiation treatments do not yet seem to be having any further deleterious effects on Catie. Her appetite remains good now that the medication is doing its thing. The next side effect that we will be seeing will be a somnolence that may cause her to sleep 14-18 hours a day. It should appear next week, and will go away when the radiation treatments cease, but will apparently reappear sometime in October. The other piece of medical news is that Catie does not have Lyme’s disease. Early on in the process of finding out what was causing Catie so much pain, and before we knew about the tumor, one of the possibilities was that she might have had Lyme’s disease which can be accompanied by joint pain similar to what Catie was experiencing. She had a blood test in June, and the results were positive, there is a high % of false positives however, so we repeated the test this week at St Jude’s, and the results came back today that she does not have Lyme’s. So we have that going for us.
Please know that we are keeping you all in our prayers. On the website, there is a prayer request tab that allows you to upload a prayer request to just Christine and myself, and if you wish, you can let us know that you would like us to mention the request in a future update or keep it private. We will respect your wishes and keep your request close to our hearts in our daily prayers.
God bless you all, and may your hearts be filled with peace,
Christine, Kevin, Maggie, Max, Catie, Mia, Molly, and M.E.
We pray that you don’t feel helpless in this situation. Help us by praying. Help us by loving your family. Help us by hugging your kids and your spouse everyday. Help us by spreading Catie’s Story to the most faithfilled people you know and to those that need more faith. Help us by writing to us, even if you don’t know us, and telling us how Catie’s Story has come to you and impacted you.
Ps – please pray for little Mia who is a bit scared to be flying to Memphis tomorrow with Megan
