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About the Book
"Happy Lies" follows the story of twin sisters Harper and Jasmine, who navigate the complexities of love, family secrets, and betrayal. As their lives unravel, they must confront dark truths and make difficult choices in pursuit of happiness and truth.
Kathryn Kuhlman
Kathryn Johanna Kuhlman was born on May 9, 1907, in Concordia, Missouri. Her parents were German and she was one of four children. Her mother was a harsh disciplinarian, who showed little love or affection. On the other hand, she had an extremely close and loving relationship with her father. She would describe, as a small child how, her father would come home from work and she would hang on his leg and cling to him. She often said that her relationship with God the Father was extremely real because of her relationship with her own father.
Kuhlman was converted, when she was 14, at an evangelistic meeting held in a small Methodist church. When she was 16 she graduated from high school, which only went to tenth grade in their town. He older sister Myrtle had married an itinerant evangelist, Everett B. Parrott. They spent their time traveling and asked that Kathryn could join them for the summer. Her parents agreed and she went to Oregon to help out. She worked with them, and often gave her testimony. When the summer was over she wanted to stay, and the couple agreed. She ended up working with them for five years.
The evangelistic team was made up of four people, Everette, Myrtle, Kathryn, and pianists named Helen Gulliford. In 1928 Everette missed a meeting in Boise, Idaho. Myrtle and Kathryn preached to cover for Everette. The pastor of the church encouraged Kathryn to step out on her own. Helen agreed to join her. Her first sermon was in a run-down pool hall in Boise, Idaho. The team covered Idaho, Utah, and Colorado for the following five years. In 1933 they moved into Pueblo, Colorado. They set up in an abandoned Montgomery Ward warehouse. They stayed there for six months.
Denver, being a much bigger city, was the next stop. They moved several times but ended up in a paper company's warehouse, which they named the Kuhlman Revival Tabernacle. Then in 1935 they moved once more to an abandoned truck garage they named the Denver Revival Tabernacle. Kathryn was seeing a lot of success in Denver. The church grew to about 2000 members. She began a radio show called "Smiling Through" and invited speakers from all over the country. One of them was Phil Kerr who taught on divine healing. In 1935 another invited evangelist was Burroughs Waltrip.
Waltrip was bad news for Kuhlman. He was a charismatic, handsome man several years older than she was. There was an immediate attraction, and one family claims to have seen the couple embracing in 1935, but he was married and had two children. Waltrip left Denver and went home to Austin, Texas, but the relationship simmered between Kuhlman and Waltrip. In 1937 he was invited back to Denver to take the pulpit for two months. Shortly after he divorced his wife and abandoned his two sons. He then spread the story that his wife had left him. He moved to Mason City, Iowa, where he told everyone he was single, and started a new ministry. Waltrip raised pledges of $70,000 to build a ministry building called Radio Chapel. It was state of the art with a disappearing pulpit and an art deco style. He appeared to be a successful and dynamic preacher.
There was an ongoing relationship between Kuhlman and Waltrip, and they married in September 1938. Kuhlman was naive about the consequences of her choices and the marriage was a disaster. She announced to her church that she and Waltrip were married and they would go between Denver and Mason City preaching at their two churches. Most of the people in her congregation left due to her relationship with Waltrip. She gave up her church in Denver, lost some of her closest associates, and moved to Mason City. Waltrip's success turned out to be a pipe dream as well. The Radio Chapel was completed in June of 1938. By October 1938 Waltrip could not meet his debts. In December Waltrip was demanding a higher salary, even with the shortfall in income. His Board of Directors quit and left him to deal with the finances. His solution was not to pay the mortgage or debts on the Chapel. Radio Chapel went into bankruptcy. Waltrip's last sermon was in May 1939. The Waltrips were on their own. Kathryn's happy vision of she and her husband flying back and forth between Denver and Mason City with a successful preaching careers was utterly demolished.
The next few years were very hard for the couple. They embarked on the road as traveling evangelists, primarily staying in the Midwest. They were not accepted in many places due to their marriage history. Initial advertisements listed Waltrip as the primary evangelist. Then occasionally Mrs. Waltrip was also mentioned. By the early 1940s Kathryn Kuhlman Waltrip was given equal billing. Finally by the mid-1940s Kathryn was using only Kathryn Kuhlman in meetings where she was the primary speaker. In 1944 Kuhlman went on an evangelistic tour on the east coast without Waltrip. It may have been a conscious decision to leave him, or she may also have taken the opportunity to reassess her life. It appears to have been more gradual as Waltrip wrote about them as a couple as late as 1946. Kuhlman never returned to Waltrip and they eventually divorced in 1947. She left her marriage behind and from then on acted as if it never existed in the first place.
In 1946 Kuhlman was asked to speak in Franklin, Pennsylvania. She was well received and decided to stay in the area. Kuhlman began preaching on radio broadcasts in Oil City, Pennsylvania. These became so popular they were picked up in Pittsburgh, and she was preaching throughout the area. She began to preach about the healing power of God. In 1947 a woman was healed of a tumor while listening to Kuhlman preach. Several Sundays later a man was also healed while she was teaching on the Holy Spirit. She was now convinced of God's healing work. One important thing to note is the context and timing of this breakout period in Kuhlman's life. 1947 was the beginning of the Healing Revival (sometimes referred to as the Latter Rain Revival) that would last for the next 10 years. What was happening in Kuhlman's meetings was breaking out across the United States. It was in this time frame that the Voice of Healing Ministry was established and men like William Branham, Oral Roberts, A.A. Allen and many others were propelled onto the public stage. Kuhlman was not associated with those groups, but stepped into the flow of what God's Spirit was doing across the nation and the world.
In 1948 Kuhlman held a series of meetings at Carnegie Hall in Pittsburgh. She eventually moved to Pittsburgh in 1950, and continued to hold meetings at Carnegie Hall until 1971. She was used by God to bring the charismatic message to many denominational churches, including the Catholic Church. (She received a lot of criticism over this and was accused of being a closet Catholic.) These were her best known years. Her style was flamboyant. She would hold her famous miracle services and the auditorium was filled to capacity every time. She was on radio and television shows. She was ordained in 1968 by the Evangelical Church Alliance. Hundreds of people were healed in her meetings, and even while listening to her on the radio or television. People she prayed for would often be hit with the power of God and be "slain in the Spirit." Kuhlman never claimed that she was the healer. She always pointed people to Jesus as their healer.
Kuhlman had been diagnosed with a heart problem in 1955. She kept a very busy schedule and overworked herself, especially in the 1970's. She traveled back and forth from Pittsburgh to Los Angeles frequently, as well as taking trips around the world. Her heart was enlarged and Kuhlman died on February 20, 1976, in Tulsa, following open-heart surgery. Videos of some of her services are still available and continue to be popular today.
Though Dead, He Still Speaks - How Satan Remembers C.S. Lewis
The scene is in hell at the annual dinner of the Tempters’ Training College for young devils. The principal, Dr. Snufftub, has just proposed a toast to the health of the guests. Grimgod, a very experienced devil, who is the guest of honor, rises to reply: Headmaster, favorite Decadents, Ghouls, Fiends, and Imps, to my Intolerable Tempters, Ghastly Graduates, and Gentledevils: Gladly do I assume my place in our great tradition to charge our recent graduates towards highest malevolence, mischief, and devilry. I could begin my remarks by dribbling on about how honored I am to have been invited — but you, my lowly esteemed guests, are not humans to be flattered, and I, not a man to feign humility. I tell you plainly: I both deserve and expected to address you this evening. If but for that incompetent Dr. Slubgob — whose faults and failings (and finish) you are all keenly aware — I would have said my piece centuries ago. You would search in vain to find one more suitable in all of Satandom to enflame you in such crucial times as ours. Now that I have your attention, let me direct it to the point of my address: As the tide begins to turn decisively in our favor, we must not let the enemy regain his footing. To initiate a final push, to rally the closing campaign, we must do what young devils tend to relax: We must sever the humans from voices of the past. Now is the time to dispel the great cloud of witnesses, silence those terrible men and women who, though they died, still speak — should they continue to make fools of us? In the name of all that is unholy, they will not! Some of you — and this to your disgrace — do not mind old books lying peacefully upon nightstands. Some of these (and check the registry to recall which ones) cast light upon our shadows, point out ancient traps, inform them of our designs, and thus threaten to rouse this otherwise slumbering generation — but there they lie, tolerated. Many of you are too young to have grown already so careless. As we feast in celebration, I for one agitate to hear their voices sound disgracefully, mockingly outside of our gates. Can you not hear them? For every scrap of the damned that lies upon your plate, for every bite that inspires your snorts and howls, awaken to the fact that negligence in this matter allows the dead to steal meat from our bellies and drink from our cups. Gnash your teeth to realize that they caused us — during this past shortage — to sup on the relatives of most in this room. Their shrieks of protest, still fresh in my mind, commission us all to exorcise these voices from the earth. Should our war efforts continue to be frustrated by ghosts? Appraise one such a phantom — whose birthday happens to fall on this very day — that Irksome Irishman whose very name has become a curse: C.S. Lewis. Stories of Aslan First recall, with trembling voice, that embarrassment, Soretongue, who lost the patient after so many decades in his grasp. A blunder, young Graduates, that few listening to my voice could hope to surpass. His influence took a staunch atheist, a reviler of the faith, and turned him into one of these haunting voices of which I now warn you. Consider the error in full. Consider what this Lewis became. For one thing, this man — unlike so many of their drab ministers and colorless academics whose work we most heartily support — made ghastly impressions upon even our most prized possessions: the children. Through that otherwise terribly useful faculty, the imagination, he corrupted boys and girls across the globe with stories containing the Enemy’s horrible Echo scribbled across their pages. In a make-believe world, with a make-believe lion, and all sorts of other bumbling characters, he captured more than their attention. Can you believe that after losing the man, this dimwitted Tempter actually laughed over Clive’s shoulder as he wrote? “Pure rubbish,” I believe he called it. He could not discern the Enemy’s propaganda smuggled into fictional stories featuring the children, princes, rats, dragons, magical kingdoms, white witches, curses, and fauns. “As threatening to our designs as an old, blind, toothless tiger,” Soretongue reported. But this seducer beckoned into Narnia to show them earth. He introduced Edmund, Lucy, Peter, Eustace, Reepicheep to introduce them to themselves. He told of Aslan — and excuse me for my exasperation — to bring them to that nasty Uncreated One of Judah. He discovered how to preach sermons to children, and Soretongue smiled at it. The Enemy plundered our keepsake through the back of a wardrobe. Wicked Leaks In another turn, that logic, which we knew those many years only as an ally, betrayed us in the end. With each passing essay, with each published book, with each responded letter, radio broadcast, and sermon, he toured them up the mountain to look above to the Enemy and then below upon the labyrinths we so carefully devised for their destruction. Soretongue grossly underestimated the danger of this topographer in our war efforts. Our twisted and turned paths, knotted by delicious deceits and half-truths, began to be spoiled by his mapping out our temptations and pits. Our smoke of relativism, atheism, materialism — and our other favorite isms — availed minimally against this crow who made his nest above the fog. In the last, you might have thought, after Soretongue was through with him, that this fattened pig turned wizard to have broken so many of our spells of worldliness. So often did he — with great exaggeration and deceit, to be sure — appeal to that other world beyond, that many of our enticements fell useless against the bewitched souls of his hearers. His many embellishments about the “weight of glory” and other such nonsense, gross as such slobber stands to us, moved countless humans to take seriously the Enemy’s lies about such things as eternal life. He, pirating the Enemy’s horrible Book, talked often and much of holidays at sea, the country beyond, about the scent, the sight, the longing for a land that they were “made for” — a home standing just over the hill, just around the bend. And something called Joy with a capital J. He fooled the vermin, with pretty colors and poetic potpourri, that the Enemy’s torture and death somehow ensured that his followers — who also take up their own crosses and endure their own sufferings after him — might be the better off in the end. May it never be! Should not the mere existence of our established kingdom below expose the slight of hand? If heaven was as the Enemy so shamelessly boasts it is, why should a host of us so violently leave? But Lewis, with his wand in hand doodling fictions, compelled the swine towards the true ruin we so narrowly escaped. They will find him out eventually. Yet, though they will be sorely and deliciously disappointed at the road’s end, we will still remain the hungrier for it. Silence the Skunks But, enough of the man. I do not mean to honor the vermin by speaking too much of him. The point is this: Do not let the message of the departed saints survive. Should we, of all beings, not know how to silence the dead? Cut out the tongues of the mischief-makers. Six feet below is too shallow — dig deeper. A toast, then. You have studied. You have hungered. You have tempted, watched, and waited for this day. Each of you has, with the indispensable help of your more fiendish advisor, damned one human soul. The dish prepared so perversely before you contains remnants of your spoil — the lion’s share going, of course, to your mentor. May it be the beginning of uninterrupted success — for you know what awaits any alternative. Raise your glasses. To a future brim-filled with courage, cruelty, and conviction. To the setting of sun and the fleeing of the light. To the return of the age of devils. To the silencing of the skunks — to one we mock, “Happy birthday!” Onward and downward! Article by Greg Morse
