Ten Years Ago …

There are events that you don’t forget, and one of them for me was 10 years ago today.

I was in the car, on my way to work, listening to the Christian radio station, when I heard that Rich Mullins had been killed in a traffic accident. The host went on to eulogize Mullins, saying that he wrote and sang great worship songs, “such as this one,” and he went on to play the a capella  classic “Screen Door.”

I didn’t know the song. At that time, the only Rich Mullins album I knew at all was “Winds of Heaven, Stuff of Earth.” My brother had introduced me to it about five years earlier, and I was content with that one. However, I was intrigued. The next day, I went to the Christian bookstore nearby and looked around. I found “Brother’s Keeper,” which is not the album with “Screen Door” on it. I was hooked. In less than two months, I completed my collection: “Rich Mullins,” “Pictures in the Sky,” “Never Picture Perfect,” “The World as Best as I Remember It” Volumes I and II, “A Liturgy, A Legacy, and a Ragamuffin Band,” “Songs,” and “The Jesus Record.” It was a couple years later that I got “Canticle of the Plains,” and I still don’t have the posthumous compilations “Songs II” or “Here in America.”

Rich Mullins has been my favorite singer for the past decade. I regret that I didn’t come to love his full body of work until his death. His songs showed a simple, boundless love for the Lord. He didn’t fluff up his songs with complicated theological imagery. He said what he wanted to say … and it was what he said that made it beautiful.

“It don’t do to preach on Moses if you bow down to the golden calf,” he sang. “It don’t do to talk about the judgment  if there’s no love in your heart.” If you can get through a song like “It Don’t Do” without choking at least once, then you’re living a better life than I am … or you’re not paying attention. “It don’t do to talk about glory if you never dare to laugh.” Rich Mullins loved his life, he loved his faith, and he loved his God.

Over the past decade, I’ve read The Ragamuffin Gospel by Brennan Manning, which heavily influenced Mullins; An Arrow Pointing to Heaven, a wonderful “devotional biography,” and The World As I Remember It: Through the Eyes of a Ragamuffin, a collection of hsi various writings. All are wonderful, and show me a lot. I can’t recommend them highly enough.

Andrew Peterson, probably my favorite living professional musician; and  Mitch McVicker, one of Mullins’ close friends, now make up most of my musical pursuit. They have their own styles, and they have their own take on songs, but I can hear his influence on them when I listen. (It’s not that hard in some cases … Andrew Peterson’s wonderful song “Nothing to Say” includes the line “Rich is on the radio …,” and Mitch McVicker has a song called “Rich’s Song.”)

Listening to Rich Mullins, and reading his works, I feel like I got to know him. He knew that he was given every gift he had for service, and to use it for his God. So he poured it out into his writing. I probably do know him.

I grew a lot from listening to, and reading, Rich Mullins’ work. I’d like to thank him for that, but of course he’s no longer here. The truth is, I’m pretty sure that he wouldn’t be interested in my thanks. I’m sure that he’d tell me to thank God for the gifts He gave to me. And I do that.  But I can’t help but do it, sometimes to the tune of “Step by Step.”

(And, yes, I know that Beaker wrote that one.)

I hope, someday, to have a love as pure and simple as Rich’s was. Or ever to write a phrase as elegant and sweet as those that fill his writing. For now, I’ll content myself with basking in the work from the genius who always knew who his Master was.