Big Kathy/Little Kathy Take Two

Last updated on: April 21, 2011 at 9:22 am by Kathy Tuan-MacLean

Big Kathy/Little Kathy Take Two 2011-04-21T09:22:00-04:00 Kathy Tuan-MacLean

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(This is blog post #5 in a series on True Self/False self–you probably want to read #1 before reading this to know what’s going on)

Lily Tomlin as Edith Anne.
I was quite a bit smaller.

Eleven years after my first Big Kathy/Little Kathy vision, God brought me back to that same vision. I now lived in Boston, was married to Scott, the mother of two kids and in such rough shape Scott had declared “You’re out of control! You need a retreat of silence!”

He bundled me off to at the Society of St. John the Evangelist for 3 days. I was still nursing 11 month old Kai-Kai, so he brought her to me on Saturday morning and evening. (Yes, my husband is awesome!) In between nursing dates, I tried to meet with God.

As I journaled about something or other, most probably my normal angst about feeling unsuccessful in all the arenas of my life, the image of the little Kathy in an enormous rocking chair came into my mind again.

Once again, the vision was blurry. Once again, I felt how uncomfortable it was to be dense real little Kathy. And I was immensely discouraged to see how little Kathy still hadn’t filled the chair. In the intervening years since my first vision, I had often remembered the image of Little Kathy in the big rocking chair, and had assumed that as I grew in wisdom and spiritual maturity, I would grow larger so that I would somehow fit the chair. Now as the vision returned, not only was I still Little Kathy, I might have been even a bit smaller.

The years of marriage and motherhood had made me wiser—at 27 and receiving the first vision of Little Kathy/Big Kathy, despite disasters in my life, I still thought pretty highly of myself. But eleven years later, I had come face to face with my failings and no longer harbored illusions that the crap in my life was someone else’s fault. It was clearly mine, and mine alone.

Knowing this made me feel even worse about myself as I looked at Little Kathy sitting there in the rocking chair.

But once again, I sensed God’s voice.

With a metaphysical chuckle, He pointed out that I had it all wrong. I was never going to grow or mature into becoming Big Kathy. I was always going to be Little Kathy, even Puny Kathy. I was never supposed to fill the chair, because God and God alone was big enough to sit in the chair.

But if I wanted, I could sit in His lap.

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