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About the Book
"Tools of Titans" by Tim Ferriss is a compilation of insights, advice, and strategies from over 100 successful individuals interviewed on Ferriss's podcast. The book covers topics such as health, wealth, and wisdom, and offers practical tips and techniques for achieving success and personal growth.
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.
lean into the hill - a runner’s lesson for the christian life
Sometimes I wonder if the apostle Paul might have been a runner. Running is a curiously common theme in his sermons and letters. He refers to his own life and ministry as running (1 Corinthians 9:26; Galatians 2:2; Philippians 2:16) and describes the Galatians’ (past) faith in similar terms, “You were running well” (Galatians 5:7). He also asks the Thessalonians to pray for him, “that the word of the Lord may speed [run] ahead and be honored” (2 Thessalonians 3:1). He speaks of human effort and exertion (in contrast to divine mercy in election) as running (Romans 9:16 NASB). He preached in Antioch about John the Baptist “finishing his course” (Acts 13:25), expressed to the Ephesian elders his desire that “only I may finish my course” (Acts 20:24), and wrote in his final letter, “I have finished the race” (2 Timothy 4:7). While walking  serves as his more common image of the Christian life (nearly thirty times in his letters), Paul’s theology had a place for speaking in more intense, even aggressive terms as well — of a kind of athletic capacity in the Christian life, as he wrote to the Corinthians, Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one receives the prize? So run that you may obtain it. (1 Corinthians 9:24) Whether Paul was a runner or not, many Christians have testified (myself included) to finding the regular experience of pushing the body beyond comfort to be of value beyond just physical health. Paul, after all, asserts that “bodily training is of some value,” even as he emphasizes that “godliness is of value in every way” (1 Timothy 4:8). And bodily training is all the more valuable when it serves godliness — when lessons learned in pushing the body translate directly into the instincts of a healthy soul. Lean into the Hill We each face our own hills each day. It might begin with getting out of bed. It might be initiating a conversation we expect to be difficult. Or starting into work or schoolwork or yard work. We all encounter hills; some more, some less. And when we do, it takes more effort to keep putting one foot in front of the other. Again and again, we face challenges big and small. And when we do, what is our default? Will we keep stepping? Slow down? Stop all together? Or lean in? Fellow runners might know the feeling. You’re tired but continuing to strain toward the finish. You come upon a hill. Your natural response will be to slow down and slog through it. Stopping to walk can feel tempting. But another mentality is to lean in. Push yourself to get over it. Pummel your body for a purpose, as Paul did (1 Corinthians 9:27). Expend more energy first. Get over the hill sooner, then enjoy the down slope. Once a runner has learned what rewards lie on the other side of a hill, “leaning in” can become the new default, and become an instinct to develop in the rest of life — learning to press through resistance, rather than backing off as a reflex. Develop the Instinct It is human and modern to take the path of least resistance and avoid the hills in life we know we should be climbing each day. This is one reason we can be so easily distracted. It’s not just our latest devices and the savvy attention merchants tricking us into distraction. Deep down we want to be distracted. Humans have craved and found distractions for centuries; the digital avenues for it have simply made distraction even easier. We typically want to avoid what we know we really should be doing because the hills that matter most are the hardest ones to climb. “The hills that matter most are the hardest ones to climb.” Here’s where “bodily training” and exercise helps not only the body but the will. Physical exertion can help us develop the mentality to lean into tasks we resist instead of avoiding them and procrastinating — to “take resistance as a spur to action instead of avoidance” (Mark Forster, Get Everything Done , 152). Instead of automatically slowing down, or turning around, when we come to a hill, we can learn to lean in . Learn to see the right hills as opportunities for fruitfulness, for what really matters — for genuine “productivity” on God’s terms. Today we are surrounded by a wealth of technologies that condition our souls and bodies to expect comfort, and encourage our minds to go to work calculating easiest means  rather than best outcomes . Without intentionality, we will be shaped by our flesh’s path of least resistance rather than the Spirit’s call to bear fruit. If we don’t take deliberate steps to rise above the increasingly low bars of discomfort in our society, we will be pulled down into the pit of lethargy around us. We will become (or remain) modern, soft, increasingly lazy, sedentary, and unproductive. But in Christ, we have cause to move in another direction — to “not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of [our minds]” (Romans 12:2), and bodies. To present them as living sacrifices (Romans 12:1). When in doubt, we don’t want to default to what’s easiest. We want to pursue what’s most important, knowing that such things are typically the most mentally, emotionally, and physically demanding. Look Through the Hill One way to learn to “lean into the hill” is to learn to look to the reward. For the runner, it is “the eyes of faith” that fuel us to press harder, when part of us would rather slow down, because we’re looking beyond the hill in front of us. Just a few more minutes, and the hill will be behind me, and I will be happier for having leaned in rather than having given in. The more we learn to look to the reward on the other side of the hill, the more — strange as it may seem at first — we learn to taste joy even on the upside. Even now. The eyes of faith begin to realize , or taste , in seed form, in the moment of hardship, the joy that is to come. Faith is a tasting now, in the present and its discomforts, of the full reward to come. Whether Paul made a habit of running or not, he had learned how to lean in. When he met conflict in Philippi, he leaned in, and bade the church do so with him. “It has been granted to you that for the sake of Christ you should not only believe in him but also suffer for his sake, engaged in the same conflict  that you saw I had and now hear that I still have” (Philippians 1:29–30). Resistance to the gospel challenged the apostle. But he didn’t back down. He engaged. He leaned in. He continued to run, and invited others to join him. So too in Thessalonica. Conflict came, and Paul leaned in. “Though we had already suffered and been shamefully treated at Philippi, as you know, we had boldness in our God to declare to you the gospel of God in the midst of much conflict” (1 Thessalonians 2:2). And yet, example though he is, Paul is not the supreme leaner, but his Lord. Jesus Leaned In Jesus “set his face to go to Jerusalem” (Luke 9:51). Why? “For it cannot be that a prophet should perish away from Jerusalem” (Luke 13:33). This was emphatically not the easiest path but the hardest. The greatest of hills. He would perish , he said, and in the worst possible way: on a cross. “Even as shame was set immediately before Jesus’s face, he looked to the joy on the far side, and leaned into the Hill.” When Hebrews exhorts us to “run with endurance the race that is set before us” (Hebrews 12:1), he also shows us how: “ looking to Jesus , the founder and perfecter of our faith,” who leaned in, himself looking to the reward — “who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God” (Hebrews 12:2). The resistance mentioned is not the one we might expect: shame. We cringe at even the thought of the physical anguish of the cross. And we should; it was literally excruciating. And yet what Hebrews highlights here is not the physical pain, horrible as it was, but the shame. It was a public, prolonged, naked execution at a crossroads. The unspeakable bodily pain of the cross would have been equaled, if not surpassed, by the shame. Yet such pain and shame  didn’t send Jesus retreating. Rather, he saw the reward on the other side of the shame. Even as such barriers were set immediately before his face, he looked to the joy on the far side, and leaned into the Hill.
