Latest / Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive / October 8, 2019 | Expresso - Kathy Hopeck

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October 8, 2019 | Expresso - Kathy Hopeck · Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive

0:00
SPEAKER_00: All right.
0:00
SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much, Connie, for inviting me.
0:03
SPEAKER_00: This is not something that I wanted to do at all.
0:05
SPEAKER_00: As a matter of fact, when she called me, I said, no, I don't do that sort of thing.
0:10
SPEAKER_00: I don't speak in front of people.
0:12
SPEAKER_00: The last time I spoke in front of a group of people was back in 1975 when I was a registered nurse in the intensive care unit at Stormont Vale.
0:20
SPEAKER_00: And they were doing a workshop, a big workshop on the new open heart surgery program.
0:26
SPEAKER_00: And I was involved in that with taking care of the patients post-surgery, and they asked me to come and speak about that.
0:34
SPEAKER_00: Well, it didn't go well because I got there.
0:38
SPEAKER_00: I was petrified.
0:39
SPEAKER_00: I didn't want to do it, and people convinced me to do it, kind of the way Connie kind of convinced me to do it.
0:45
SPEAKER_00: And uh and so I went and I did it, but I was so nervous that I spoke so fast.
0:52
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I think I was done in 10 minutes and I was out of there.
0:55
SPEAKER_00: So consequently, they never asked me to do it again, which was really a good thing.
1:00
SPEAKER_00: So, yes, I first refused to do this for Connie.
1:03
SPEAKER_00: I told her I would think about it and I would pray about it, and two things happened.
1:07
SPEAKER_00: My husband, God love him, said to me, Why wouldn't you want to go somewhere and share what God's done in your life?
1:13
SPEAKER_00: Well, he's used to being in front of people, has been his whole career, so of course it's easy for him.
1:19
SPEAKER_00: The second thing that made me think about it as I was praying about it is that my 17-year-old grandson had a really unique experience at his church camp this summer.
1:28
SPEAKER_00: And the first thing that he did when he got back was he called his grandparents and I don't know who else and said, I want to come over and I want to tell you what God's done for me.
1:37
SPEAKER_00: So as I thought about that, I thought, wow, I can't let my grandson down.
1:42
SPEAKER_00: So he can do it, I can do it.
1:44
SPEAKER_00: Although it was just the two of us when he did it, but anyway, that's okay.
1:48
SPEAKER_00: So those are the reasons why I did it.
1:50
SPEAKER_00: Um I'll just start out by saying I was born and raised in Topeka.
1:53
SPEAKER_00: I went through Siemen High School, the school district out there, grade school, high school, and junior high.
1:59
SPEAKER_00: Graduated from Siemen in 71, went straight into nursing school, graduated from there at Stormont Vale at 74, and got married to my first husband.
2:08
SPEAKER_00: Now, during my childhood, I had a good childhood.
2:11
SPEAKER_00: My parents did take us to church.
2:13
SPEAKER_00: They dropped us off as they went back home to have some quiet time, I guess.
2:16
SPEAKER_00: And occasionally they went with us on holidays.
2:18
SPEAKER_00: So I did have some church experience as I grew up, but nothing very, you know, um strong or very supported by my family.
2:27
SPEAKER_00: My parents loved me, they took good care of me.
2:30
SPEAKER_00: I lacked for nothing.
2:31
SPEAKER_00: As a matter of fact, my mother loved to spend money, so we got whatever we wanted when we just asked for it and we got it.
2:37
SPEAKER_00: At some point in my childhood, around about the age of 11 or 12, a traumatic event happened in our family.
2:43
SPEAKER_00: And I all of a sudden became an angry kid, unhappy, felt unloved, uh, felt like my parents had a favorite, and in our family, I have two older sisters which are no longer living today, but at that time that was traumatic for me.
3:02
SPEAKER_00: And so how I responded to that was was, hmm, I don't need you.
3:06
SPEAKER_00: I'll just do what I want to do and I'll just take care of myself and I don't need you.
3:10
SPEAKER_00: And I became very angry.
3:12
SPEAKER_00: What that translated into was I did that to everybody then.
3:15
SPEAKER_00: So for the most of my life, I was a pretty angry person.
3:18
SPEAKER_00: If you um didn't do what I wanted or I felt like you let me down, I just shoved you to side and probably treated you pretty cruelly.
3:27
SPEAKER_00: An example of that is when I was working in the cardiovascular surgeon's office and I was rooming a patient, and it was a lady who I went to high school with, and I knew I had treated people poorly then, but she came in and boy was she glaring at me.
3:43
SPEAKER_00: And I'll come back to that story in a minute, because she knew what I was like then, and it was a real confrontation for me.
3:50
SPEAKER_00: Um, but anyway, got got out of nursing school, knew that's what I wanted to do, had a job at Stormont Vale, married my first husband.
3:57
SPEAKER_00: In about two years, I was unhappy with him, so I just walked out on him.
4:01
SPEAKER_00: I mean, that's just how I did things.
4:02
SPEAKER_00: I just walked out.
4:03
SPEAKER_00: If you weren't doing what I wanted you to do, if you didn't act the way I wanted you to do, I was just done with you, you know.
4:11
SPEAKER_00: And it didn't help that at that time a very attractive young man came to Stormont Vale to help start the open heart surgery program, and I was attracted to him.
4:20
SPEAKER_00: So there you have it.
4:22
SPEAKER_00: I wasn't walking with the Lord, wasn't happy with my life, pretty angry person.
4:27
SPEAKER_00: People failed me, didn't like it, just got rid of him.
4:30
SPEAKER_00: So I kind of thought, oh, this guy over here is gonna do it for me.
4:33
SPEAKER_00: You know, I'm really, he's really gonna be, he's successful, he's attractive, you know, he does all these great things, and so I was attracted to him.
4:40
SPEAKER_00: So therefore it was easy to walk out on my first husband.
4:43
SPEAKER_00: I look back now, I'm grateful that I didn't have any children at that time in that marriage.
4:48
SPEAKER_00: It was devastating to my ex-husband, it was devastating to his family, but you know, I just didn't care.
4:54
SPEAKER_00: That was what I wanted to do.
4:56
SPEAKER_00: And so we started dating, my present husband Joe and I.
5:00
SPEAKER_00: We lived together for a while, things weren't going well, it was very traumatic, it was very rock and rolling, nothing was good, obviously because neither one of us were happy, you know, we didn't know what we wanted, we didn't have that fulfillment of Christ or anything in our life, and so we just kind of fought and carried on and so forth.
5:18
SPEAKER_00: He had a son from his first marriage that he walked out on as well.
5:22
SPEAKER_00: Um, so um he was very special to me.
5:25
SPEAKER_00: I loved him very, very much.
5:27
SPEAKER_00: Um, but anyway, so that's kind of how our relationship went.
5:30
SPEAKER_00: When I was in nursing school, I God is just so funny how he does things.
5:34
SPEAKER_00: I roomed with a girl by the name of Joan.
5:37
SPEAKER_00: And at that time, she ticked me off too, and I quit rooming with her in the apartment because she made me mad.
5:43
SPEAKER_00: She didn't do what I wanted to do or how I wanted to do it.
5:46
SPEAKER_00: She had her boyfriend over there all the time, you know.
5:48
SPEAKER_00: I just couldn't take it.
5:49
SPEAKER_00: So I just walked out on that situation as well.
5:53
SPEAKER_00: But years later, God brought her back into my life in a very strong way.
6:00
SPEAKER_00: Now, Joe had committed to the Lord when he was about 17 years old.
6:04
SPEAKER_00: Um, pretty much walked with the Lord, went to team challenge when he was at Ohio State University and so forth, but then walked away from it.
6:12
SPEAKER_00: Um, too many things, I guess, at college that can pull you away from that.
6:17
SPEAKER_00: So, you know, he kind of had beginning to have this drawing back towards the Lord, and he didn't quite understand what was going on, but he kind of started thinking about God a little bit more often, knew that our relationship wasn't that good.
6:31
SPEAKER_00: And so one day we didn't know it, but during the years that I had not seen this particular person, she had become a Christian and she had taken upon herself to pray for me.
6:43
SPEAKER_00: She worked with Joe in surgery, and so she was praying for him as well.
6:46
SPEAKER_00: And so one day he was in his office and he said, the Lord spoke to him, or he heard a voice, whatever, that said, You have to talk to Joan today, right now, about me, about God.
7:00
SPEAKER_00: So he called her up in surgery.
7:01
SPEAKER_00: She was petrified, she said.
7:03
SPEAKER_00: She came up there and he said, I have to ask you about the Lord.
7:06
SPEAKER_00: So she shared her testimony and what was going on with her.
7:09
SPEAKER_00: And I don't even think at the time he knew that we'd ever been roommates.
7:12
SPEAKER_00: So, you know, this is just really unique of the Lord to do it that way.
7:15
SPEAKER_00: So, anyway, he decided he wanted to go back to church.
7:18
SPEAKER_00: We went back to church.
7:20
SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, that was okay with me.
7:22
SPEAKER_00: I kind of wanted to hang on to the guy, so I was going to kind of do what he wanted to do.
7:25
SPEAKER_00: Okay, you want to go to church?
7:26
SPEAKER_00: We'll go to church.
7:28
SPEAKER_00: But then I started realizing, mm, you know, I might lose this guy.
7:32
SPEAKER_00: You know, he's kind of getting involved with church, and I don't know, you know, is that what I want to do?
7:38
SPEAKER_00: But also during that time, the Lord had been putting on my heart that, and I never wanted children.
7:43
SPEAKER_00: My kids know that.
7:44
SPEAKER_00: I never wanted children.
7:45
SPEAKER_00: I never babysat in high school.
7:47
SPEAKER_00: Just, you know, just they were little dirty urchins or something.
7:50
SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
7:51
SPEAKER_00: Never cared anything about them, didn't want to have any.
7:54
SPEAKER_00: But all of a sudden I started to want to have a family.
7:57
SPEAKER_00: And I wanted to have those things, and it came to be a tug on my heart, you know, and I would kind of occasionally I would journal a little bit about it, you know, or I'd write it down and that sort of thing.
8:08
SPEAKER_00: So we began going to church, and we went to a new church, um, uh was a house church, had rented apartment or in a building, and it was New Covenant Fellowship, which I think some of you probably know.
8:20
SPEAKER_00: I know I went with Margie over there.
8:22
SPEAKER_00: And so we started going there, and of course, I really am trying to pray, Lord, what what is this all about?
8:29
SPEAKER_00: What do you want me to do?
8:30
SPEAKER_00: You know, you need to speak to me.
8:32
SPEAKER_00: You know, Joe's recommitted his life back to you.
8:35
SPEAKER_00: What's going on?
8:36
SPEAKER_00: What's wrong with me?
8:37
SPEAKER_00: You know, so forth and so on.
8:39
SPEAKER_00: And I didn't really think I was getting anywhere with the Lord at all.
8:42
SPEAKER_00: But one day, sitting in church on Sunday, and I wish I could remember what the pastor said, but he said something in his sermon.
8:49
SPEAKER_00: And all of a sudden, I just had this overwhelming desire and this overwhelming feeling of what I had done to everybody that I knew in my life, how angry I had been, how I had treated everybody, how I'd walked out.
9:04
SPEAKER_00: I just felt so bad.
9:05
SPEAKER_00: I just felt like all this ugliness God was just saying, you know, you can get rid of all of that.
9:11
SPEAKER_00: You can be a new person, you know, you can just shed all this stuff.
9:15
SPEAKER_00: This is what you're like, but you don't have to be that way.
9:18
SPEAKER_00: You can be a new person.
9:20
SPEAKER_00: And I, you know, I don't even remember at what point in the service this was, but I just stood up and started talking about, you know, God was speaking to me and how I want, you know, had asked for forgiveness and so forth.
9:30
SPEAKER_00: And just felt like all of that anger and all of that selfishness and all of that stuff just kind of, you know, I was so glad that it was gone.
9:40
SPEAKER_00: Um, and so we began our life.
9:41
SPEAKER_00: We got married the very next week, uh, end at church, and we began our life, and we had five beautiful children.
9:47
SPEAKER_00: Well, at one point in that life, um, old habits die hard.
9:52
SPEAKER_00: I became very unhappy.
9:54
SPEAKER_00: My youngest one, our youngest one, Rebecca, was three at the time, and I just was unhappy.
10:00
SPEAKER_00: And I stood in my bedroom and I looked out the window one day and I said, God, if this is what you call the Christian life, I'm done.
10:07
SPEAKER_00: I don't want to have anything to do with this.
10:09
SPEAKER_00: You know, I just don't.
10:10
SPEAKER_00: I'm not happy.
10:12
SPEAKER_00: Things aren't going well, you know.
10:13
SPEAKER_00: I've got all these kids, but I'm just not happy, you know.
10:17
SPEAKER_00: And so I just said that.
10:19
SPEAKER_00: Well, it wasn't probably about a month or so after that that I woke up in the middle of the night sick.
10:25
SPEAKER_00: Just all of a sudden, I thought, oh my word, I've got an appendicitis, you know, pain on my right side.
10:30
SPEAKER_00: Just figured, you know, what a crazy thing to be happening.
10:34
SPEAKER_00: And so Joe took, excuse me, Joe took me to the hospital, and they said, Well, it's not appendicitis, but there's something there.
10:41
SPEAKER_00: We can see it on a sonogram, but we don't know what it is.
10:44
SPEAKER_00: But I had a high fever and I was very sick, so they said, We're taking you to surgery right away.
10:49
SPEAKER_00: Whatever it is, we're going to get it out.
10:51
SPEAKER_00: Well, they took me to surgery.
10:53
SPEAKER_00: They told me after surgery they thought it was a necrotic bowel.
10:57
SPEAKER_00: The next day, when the path report came back, it was a sarcoma, which is a very rapidly growing cancer.
11:03
SPEAKER_00: It had wrapped around the smooth muscle in my bowel.
11:06
SPEAKER_00: And so the oncologist came in my room the very next day, and he and I knew him from having been a nurse, and he looked at me and he said, Well, Kathy, this is what it is.
11:16
SPEAKER_00: If I find any more, I cannot do anything for you.
11:20
SPEAKER_00: Wow, you know, all of a sudden you start thinking about your life.
11:26
SPEAKER_00: I mean, my goodness, I was so unhappy.
11:28
SPEAKER_00: The kids were driving me crazy.
11:30
SPEAKER_00: I wanted a better house, you know.
11:32
SPEAKER_00: My husband wasn't fulfilling all my needs, you know, and all I just wanted out of it, my old habits of just walking out on everything, just done with it, you know, don't want to do it.
11:41
SPEAKER_00: And all of a sudden it was gone.
11:43
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I didn't know that I would survive.
11:45
SPEAKER_00: So all of those things that I just thought I wanted to get rid of could just be gone.
11:49
SPEAKER_00: Just poof, right there.
11:52
SPEAKER_00: So it was, it was just really, you know, wow.
11:56
SPEAKER_00: You know, I thought I was so unhappy.
11:58
SPEAKER_00: How do you feel now?
11:59
SPEAKER_00: It's kind of what I thought.
12:01
SPEAKER_00: Well, they did a lot of tests, and please tell me about time.
12:04
SPEAKER_00: They did a lot of tests and did not find any more.
12:07
SPEAKER_00: So I thanked the Lord for that.
12:09
SPEAKER_00: They told me I would have to do six months of chemotherapy.
12:13
SPEAKER_00: I did not want to do that.
12:15
SPEAKER_00: But when it was only a 20% chance of reoccurrence if I did the chemotherapy as compared to a 50% chance of reoccurrence if I didn't, my husband looked at me and said, You're gonna do it.
12:25
SPEAKER_00: I didn't want to.
12:27
SPEAKER_00: They told me I had to do four days in the hospital, I would be away from my kids, I didn't want to do that.
12:33
SPEAKER_00: Ultimately, what ended up happening was for six months, once a month, I carried two portable pump packs on both of my hips with four different medications that took four days to infuse, and that's the way I lived my life.
12:47
SPEAKER_00: But I did everything that I wanted to do with the kids.
12:50
SPEAKER_00: Now, during that time there were people praying for me, and you know, I'm kind of just in shock and moving along and just getting through it as best I can.
12:59
SPEAKER_00: But God did so many things in that time, He totally changed my life.
13:05
SPEAKER_00: I felt like He took me out of what I said I didn't want, and in some way showed me the alternative.
13:14
SPEAKER_00: All of a sudden, thinking about not having my kids, not having my husband.
13:20
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's just it was ridiculous.
13:22
SPEAKER_00: And he just he just really showed me, I felt like he took me out of something, put me somewhere else to show me what was going on in my life.
13:30
SPEAKER_00: And it changed my life.
13:32
SPEAKER_00: It really did.
13:34
SPEAKER_00: During that time, there was a fellow at our church.
13:36
SPEAKER_00: At that time, we were going to North Topeka Baptist, and he became my prayer warrior.
13:40
SPEAKER_00: And every Sunday at the altar he prayed for me.
13:43
SPEAKER_00: And then my pastor's wife one time had said to me, at when the elders were praying for me at our home, she said, The Lord gave me a vision, and what he showed me was you sitting at the head of the table with all of your children and all of your grandchildren.
13:58
SPEAKER_00: And I knew then that God was going to restore me back to what I had, and he was gonna give me even more.
14:05
SPEAKER_00: And what a great God he was, as mean as I was, as much as I said, I don't want to have anything to do with you, yet he was going to do that for me, and I believed that, and I hung on to that.
14:16
SPEAKER_00: And then another friend of mine shared with me the scripture from Jeremiah 29, 11, which I think probably everybody knows when they say, um, excuse me, I can't read right now.
14:30
SPEAKER_00: For I know the plans I have for you.
14:32
SPEAKER_00: This is the Lord's declaration, plans for your well-being, not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope.
14:40
SPEAKER_00: And then she shared that with me, but as I went on to read it, he said, You will call to me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you.
14:48
SPEAKER_00: You will seek me and find me when you search for me with all your heart.
14:52
SPEAKER_00: I will be found by you.
14:54
SPEAKER_00: And this is the Lord's declaration.
14:56
SPEAKER_00: And I will restore your fortunes and gather you from all the nations.
15:00
SPEAKER_00: He's uh has sent this, Jeremiah had sent this letter to the exiles when Nebuchadnezzar had exiled people from Israel.
15:08
SPEAKER_00: He said, I've gathered you from all of the nations and places where I banished you.
15:12
SPEAKER_00: This is the Lord's declaration.
15:14
SPEAKER_00: I will restore you to the place from which I deported you.
15:18
SPEAKER_00: And he did.
15:19
SPEAKER_00: He took me out of that place, that awful place that I was at, of selfishness, of anger, of just uh, you know, I guess wanting things.
15:29
SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
15:29
SPEAKER_00: I really don't even know what it was, wanting to be loved, wanting something.
15:33
SPEAKER_00: I just wasn't happy.
15:34
SPEAKER_00: And he deported me out of that and took me in a way to captivity, his captivity, where I just spent time praying with him and spending that time with him and loving him and understanding what he had given me and what kind of a God that he was.
15:51
SPEAKER_00: And so I just I feel like that's what he did for me, and then he restored me back to what I had, to my children, to my husband, to my home.
16:01
SPEAKER_00: And things have been not wonderful, not great, and not perfect, but it was something that my kids are laughing.
16:11
SPEAKER_00: But it was something that I needed.
16:14
SPEAKER_00: I needed that drastic of pulling me out, waking me up, if you want to say it that way, shaking me up, and saying, Oh, you're just not happy with this stuff, fine.
16:24
SPEAKER_00: You don't have to have it.
16:26
SPEAKER_00: Now, that's my interpretation of it.
16:29
SPEAKER_00: Whatever God's interpretation of it was, it doesn't matter because to me that that I know exactly what he was thinking or doing at that time, but he changed me.
16:40
SPEAKER_00: And he really, you know, brought me back to where I wanted to be.
16:44
SPEAKER_00: And um, it's been great since then.
16:48
SPEAKER_00: So oh yes, I forgot the story about the woman.
16:54
SPEAKER_00: Well, there were a lot of people in high school that if you didn't like me, I didn't like you, and you and they knew it.
16:59
SPEAKER_00: They knew I didn't like them.
17:01
SPEAKER_00: I just had a few friends because only those few friends would fit into what I wanted a friend to look like and to be.
17:07
SPEAKER_00: So, is there anybody in here that I went to high school with?
17:12
SPEAKER_00: That's what I need to know right now.
17:15
SPEAKER_00: So I'm rooming this patient.
17:18
SPEAKER_00: Um it's her husband.
17:20
SPEAKER_00: She comes in, she's sitting in the chair next to her husband, and I'm putting stuff in the computer.
17:24
SPEAKER_00: I know very well who she is.
17:25
SPEAKER_00: I know I treated her terrible.
17:27
SPEAKER_00: I know I did.
17:28
SPEAKER_00: She's glaring at me.
17:31
SPEAKER_00: She's not friendly.
17:32
SPEAKER_00: I tried to speak to her, she wasn't friendly.
17:36
SPEAKER_00: And I felt like God had given me one opportunity to make something right and to confess what I was like.
17:44
SPEAKER_00: And I looked at her, and her name was Carla, and I said, Carla, I know I treated you terrible in high school.
17:50
SPEAKER_00: I said, I know I was a I used a bad word.
17:55
SPEAKER_00: And she looked at me and she said, Yeah, you did.
17:58
SPEAKER_00: And I said, I am so sorry.
18:00
SPEAKER_00: I just need to ask you your forgiveness.
18:02
SPEAKER_00: I was an angry person, an ugly person.
18:05
SPEAKER_00: You didn't deserve it.
18:07
SPEAKER_00: I shouldn't have done it.
18:08
SPEAKER_00: And wow, that was just that was so much fun to be able to do that for her, you know.
18:13
SPEAKER_00: And then she smiled and we chatted and and we went on with the rest of the appointment.
18:18
SPEAKER_00: But that was a spare very special time that God gave me.
18:22
SPEAKER_00: Now I have not run into any that's why I was asking if anybody in here went to Siemens, because we might need to meet afterwards for a little apology session or whatever, but uh which I'll be happy to do.
18:34
SPEAKER_00: But that was that was so much fun to be able to do that.
18:38
SPEAKER_00: And I thought, wow, I hope that one person she walked out of there and felt better about herself because I'm pretty sure I was pretty tough on her as well as other people.
18:49
SPEAKER_00: Um so that's kind of it very quickly.
18:52
SPEAKER_00: Um like I said, I talk very fast, but thank you guys for letting me share.
18:58
SPEAKER_00: Um, I did like I said, I didn't want to.
19:00
SPEAKER_00: It makes me very nervous, but I know this is a very safe place, and I know many of you and love you, so thank you so much.