"This was the first time the power of the risen, resurrected Christ came through to me."
n late December 1934, a couple of months before the building to house the Denver Revival Tabernacle was purchased, Kathryn experienced the first real tragedy in her life: Her beloved father was killed in an accident. He had fallen on an icy street or been struck by a car that swerved to try to miss him in a snowstorm. It was never determined for certain what really happened.
I
Because phone lines were down, it was hours later before a friend could reach Kathryn in Colorado. She started home, driving from Denver across Kansas toward Missouri, with the snowstorm still at blizzard conditions.
She said only God knew how fast she drove on icy roads and in near-zero visibility. At Kansas City, she called home to have them tell her father that she was almost there—only to find that he had remained in a coma and died early that morning, December 30, two days after the accident.
What seemed like an unending time later, in the early hours of the next morning, she arrived home to find Papa laid out in his casket in the living room with mourners sitting up to keep the traditional vigil. As she told it to an interviewer more than thirty-five years later, hate welled 43
KATHRYN KUHLMAN
up inside her toward the youth who had been driving the car.
She said:1
I had always been a happy person, and Papa had helped to make me happy. Now he was gone, and in his place, I was battling unfamiliar strangers of fear and hate.
In 1971, she told a magazine interviewer:2
I had the most perfect father a girl ever had. In my eyes, Papa could do no wrong. He was my ideal. He never spanked me. He never had to. All he had to do was get a certain look on his face. Mama wouldn't hesitate to punish me when I needed it. But Papa punished by letting me know I had hurt him—and that hurt worse than any of my mother's spankings.
She had been gone from home more than ten years with only a few visits in between. Travel was expensive and time-consuming in the Twenties and Thirties. Now Papa would never be able to hear her preach. Later, she related that she had spewed out venom over the accident to everyone she spoke to, and hatred seethed within her until the day of the funeral.3
Sitting there in the front row of the little Baptist church, I still refused to accept my father's death. It couldn't be. My papa, so full of love for his "baby;' so tender and gentle, it couldn't be that he was gone.
After the sermon, the townspeople left their pews and solemnly walked down the aisle to gaze one last time into the casket. Then they were gone. The church was empty except for the family and attendants.
One by one, my family rose from their seats and filed by the coffin. Mama. My two sisters. My brother. Only I was left in the pew.
The funeral director walked over and said, "Kathryn, 1 Hosier, p. 62,60.
2 Ibid, p. 62,60.
3 Ibid, pp. 63,64.
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THE DAY KATHRYN KUHLMAN "DIED"
would you like to see your father before I close the casket?"
Suddenly I was standing at the front of the church, looking down—my eyes fixed not on Papa's face, but on his shoulder, that shoulder on which I had so often leaned. I remembered the last conversation we had had. We were in the back yard ....he was standing beside the clothesline, reaching up with his hand on the wire.
"Baby' he said, "When you were a little girl, remember how you used to snuggle your head on my shoulder and say, 'Papa, give me a nickel?'"
I nodded, 'And you always did."
"Because it was what you asked for. But, baby, you could have asked for my last dollar, and I would have given you that too."
I leaned over and gently put my hand on that shoulder in the casket. And as I did, something happened. All that my fingers caressed was a suit of clothes. Not just the black wool coat, but everything that box contained was simply something discarded, loved once, laid aside now. Papa wasn't there.
...This was the first time the power of the risen, resurrected Christ really came through to me. Suddenly I was no longer afraid of death; and as my fear disappeared, so did my hate. It was my first real healing experience. Papa wasn't dead. He was alive. There was no longer any need to fear or hate.
From this experience, apparently she felt her father was with the Lord, yet she told an interviewer in 1973 that not knowing whether he was born again was one of the great frustrations of her life.4
Kathryn dated her understanding of death and her compassion for other people's sorrow and grief from that moment at her father's funeral.5
That was many years ago. Since then, I have been able to stand at the open grave with countless others and share the hope that lives in me. There have been mountaintops across those years, opportunities for travel and ministry and 4 Buckingham, p. 64.
5 Hosier, p. 64.
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preaching. But, you know, growth has come not on the mountaintops but in the valleys. That was the first valley—the deepest—the one that meant most.