Winds of Heaven, Stuff of Earth

Spiritual Conversations Inspired by the Life & Lyrics of Rich Mullins

Worthy Publishing Group

Contents

Bare

Cindy Morgan

Humility is not thinking less of yourself: it is thinking of yourself less.

C. S. LEWIS

He was barefoot.

The meeting ground between something sacred and something raw and human is written throughout the pages of history.

God speaks to Moses through a burning bush: "Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground" (Exodus 3:5 NIV). Adam and Eve, covered in fig leaves in the garden, when God asks, "Who told you that you were naked?" (Genesis 3:11 NIV). Jesus hanging on the cross, depicted with only a loincloth over His battered figure, His bloody feet pierced by a large nail.

Leading up to His crucifixion, I wonder if Jesus was stripped of His sandals, wilting under the weight of the beam of wood that would become His cross as He carried it down the narrow street of the "Via Dolorosa" (which translated means the "Painful Way"), His bare feet digging into sharp rocks and gravel with each agonizing step.

Bare.

It is the state in which we arrive to life, without any protection or disguise to cover our nakedness, our shame, who we are in our most raw and vulnerable form. We learn to present ourselves, to put our best foot forward. We wear our finest clothes, our most stylish statement, hiding what truly is for fear of falling short. We are afraid there isn't enough grace to cover our sin, so we desperately try to cover it up.

The last time I saw Rich Mullins we were performing an event — strangely enough, called "The Spectacular"— at Nashville's historic Ryman Auditorium. The concert was hosted during the week of the Dove Awards, Gospel music's annual awards show, as a kind of holy spectacle showcasing Christian music's brightest talent. I had been a part of the event for many years, but that year — that night — it would be different.

From the moment Rich stepped onto the stage, the atmosphere changed in that old church. While all of the rest of us donned our most expensive clothes, Rich walked out wearing a crumpled black T-shirt and jeans faded not from an artificial processing to make them look just so, but faded from real wear and real tear. His hair hung down in an unkempt, unintentional bob, the result of not giving much thought to a haircut. Then I looked down and saw the thing that made me the most surprised ... No shoes.

His brown bare feet padded across the wood floor of the Ryman stage, and as he sat down at a nine-foot Steinway piano, I imagined him pressing down the sustain pedal, how it must have been cold and slippery. But it didn't faze Rich in the slightest. He began to play "Our God Is an Awesome God." The air in the auditorium was electrified by his voice and his musicianship. By his vulnerability, his inability to care what others thought, his rawness before God and before us. It is a moment I will never forget.

At the end of the song, the audience erupted with a standing ovation, begging Rich for another song. He looked at the crowd in a sort of bewilderment and walked off the stage, never to return. I wonder if Rich was thinking that we had missed the whole point of the song ... "Our God is an awesome God," not "Rich is an awesome artist."

God is the point of our existence, not success, or fame, or looking the part, or covering up that which is unseemly or sinful or embarrassing.

Let us lay bare that which we are, the things we struggle with, all that we cannot hide anyway, and place them at the holy, bare feet of Jesus, or we may never experience the true grace and mercy of an awesome and loving God. Where the struggler meets the sacred. Where our humanity meets holiness.

Nothing in all creation is hidden from God's sight. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him to whom we must give account.

Hebrews 4:13 NIV

Flaws and All

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.

Ian MacLaren

This affective, widely cited quote is most commonly attributed to Ian MacLaren, the pen name for nineteenth-century Scottish author and theologian Reverend John Watson. Though the phraseology is charming, the admonition within is penetrating.

We all carry baggage, don't we? Some of us are weighted down with particularly dense issues. Rich certainly was. We press through difficult relationships, commit ourselves to recovery from addictions, and fight against low self-esteem and low-grade depressions. Life requires much of many of us, and so we discipline our lives, attempting to work through and around all that we lug mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. And yet, these issues persist in possessing our attention and affection.

Though the details of our lives storybook very differently, at some point, we all understand hardship.

In becoming aware of our shortcomings, we often become critical of ourselves, and of others. But when we allow our hearts to be purged of what feels temporarily good by what is eternally best, we become more gracious to ourselves, and to others. And grace makes the world go 'round.

We will never fully know what it cost the person sitting next to us on Sunday to slip out of bed, slide into that pew, and pray that prayer. I would venture to say most of us don't know what it takes for any of us to get to the sanctuary. All the beds lain in. All the nitty-gritty we try to surrender but struggle to forfeit. We keep working for Jesus's attention, rather than simply accepting His friendship.

It's impossible for us to live blameless lives. But we can share our battle scars as an invitation to dive into the deep end of redemption — where fear is washed out by forgiveness, guilt is drowned by grace, and heartache is plunged beneath waves of healing, over and over again.

"Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle."

This is our story. This was Rich's song. Flaws and all.

* * *

Yet you have a few people in Sardis who have not soiled their clothes. They will walk with me, dressed in white, for they are worthy. The one who is victorious will, like them, be dressed in white. I will never blot out the name of that person from the book of life, but will acknowledge that name before my Father and his angels.

Revelation 3:4–5 NIV

I am a Christian because I have seen the love of God lived out in the lives of people who know Him. The Word has become flesh and I have encountered God in the people who have manifested (in many "unreasonable" ways) His Presence; a Presence that is more than convincing — it is a Presence that is compelling.

Rich Mullins

The Ragamuffin Truth

Brennan Manning

Next to Jesus, maybe all the heavens and the hills of the earth, all the music and works of art, all the rainbows and wines and burning bushes and boars seem like tiny tokens — great as they are — and maybe the issue is not so much about how and through what God swears His love, as it is about whether or not God does love.

Rich Mullins

I consider meeting Rich Mullins one of the most truthful times in my life. We met the first time in Colorado Springs. I was out there doing a short, three-day preaching mission and Rich was also visiting. He asked me [if he] could do an interview. Rich talked about the grace of God rather than personal performance, and that was a track I was locked into — personal performance, which, by the way, never works.

If you examine the content of his writing, you have so many frequent references to the love of God in Christ Jesus that it seems to overshadow everything else. That's the impression I got. He wrote with utter simplicity and candor about his own brokenness.

Rich's candor and brutal honesty ... opened the door to all kinds of questions for me. The honesty, when he was talking about his own life, was so refreshing. He was not ashamed to talk about anything — his successes, his failures, and there was nothing out of bounds.

Suppose you came to the conviction of the Holy Spirit that the most important value in life was letting yourself be loved by God? Talk about a radical transformation, a total absence of low self-esteem ... not boastful. [That's how Rich was.] I think you know when you meet somebody who is absolutely convinced of the love of God. And when they're not, they are mouthing the pious phrases and it's all basically fraud. They haven't laid hold of the depth of the reality of God's love.

Rich spent a lot of time in solitude, which I believe is indispensable for anyone who would come to grips with the love of God. [Solitude is] a prayer of listening — letting yourself be loved by God. As outrageous as it may seem, [it is admitting] that God really has a thing for me. ... No matter what comes down, He can't stop loving you. When that becomes the hard right truth of your existence, [you] let God be God.

In my limited experiences of the real lovers of God, [they] are always solitary men and women. They have a sheer delight in being alone with God because they are not waiting for Him to remind them of their latest hang-ups. He knows all about that better than they do.

The love of God is not a nice theory; it's a pious reality, but it so marks your day. What else matters? To be loved by God — to me, that's the heart of Christianity, letting myself be loved, in spite of all the powerful evidence to the contrary. Letting God be God.

* * *

We have experienced and we have entrusted our lives to the love of God in us.

God is love. Anyone who lives faithfully in love also lives faithfully in God, and God lives in him. This love is fulfilled with us, so that on the day of judgment we have confidence based on our identification with Jesus in this world. Love will never invoke fear. Perfect love expels fear, particularly the fear of punishment. The one who fears punishment has not been completed through love.

1 John 4:16–18

Reflections ON Rich

David McCracken

The joy of Christian life is that those aches, those needs, that emptiness that we are going to encounter because we are human is ultimately met in Christ. And that everything that we try to fill it with that is not Christ will never really fill it.

Rich Mullins

"Don't you ever get tired of being ... perfect?" he asked.

"Huh?" I muttered, completely oblivious as to where this conversation was headed.

With a clarity that was a little too close for my comfort, he repeated, "Don't you ever get tired of pretending like everything in your life is fine, David?"

Wait a minute. Three seconds ago I thought this conversation was going to be about him. Whiplashed into full engagement, I said, "What are you talking about? You know my life isn't perfect."

"Yes, I do, but have you ever thought about the beauty you might experience if you were brave enough to share the broken parts of yourself with anyone else?"

I met Rich when I was a naïve college kid interning at the record label where he had recently signed a deal. And for the next twelve years we navigated life together. I became his champion at a time when he desperately needed one, and he certainly was mine. I had never experienced a friendship like his before. At that moment, I wasn't sure that I wanted one that would dare to call my lifelong bluff. In a way that only a true friend could, he used this conversation to lovingly guide me toward seeing a counselor for the first time.

After politely listening to the story of my life up to that point, my new counselor said it sounded like I had lived a perfectly perfect life and she wasn't sure that I needed God — much less her insight. She thought I should try living apart from a relationship with God so that I could really discover whether or not my need for Him was real. I balked at her challenge. With all I could muster of my own strength, I clung for years to my idea of what a relationship with God looks like as I continued to live my very best, "perfect" life.

And then Rich died.

I was not even close to being equipped to face the pain of that loss. And so I didn't.

Ten years later, I finally began to allow myself to fully experience the depth of my grief. I did not do it perfectly. I felt that I had been cosmically sucker-punched by the loss of my most intimate friend, and I was paralyzed with fear that no one would ever know and love me as well as Rich had. So at the decade-old prodding of my counselor, I set out on a mission to find out if I really did need God — a mission that at first was utterly self-destructive.

In an effort to strip myself of the places where I found Him readily available, I abandoned a church community that would never have abandoned me and I pulled away from anyone who might offer some real hope. I started drinking. I lost fifty pounds in six weeks. Friends thought I was dying, and though I wasn't exactly trying to kill myself, for eighteen months I tested God to see if He had any interest at all in saving me — to see if He thought I was worth saving. After ignoring several of His creative attempts to get my attention, my reckless behavior resulted in my involvement in a serious car accident. I broke bones from head to toe, smashed my nose, busted my eye socket, endured a fractured wrist and elbow, and shattered my ankle. Now a plethora of permanent plates and screws are a daily reminder of what happens when you abandon real hope.

What I remember most while recuperating is that every time I opened my eyes there was an outrageously and beautifully diverse group of saints at my bedside. As I was wheeled away for surgery to repair my body, I recall the beloved friends who laid hands on me, praying for the healing of my soul ... the holy hands and tender hearts of my softball teammates as they shaved my face and washed the dried blood from my hair ... my relatives and my "chosen" family who continued to love and provide constant care for me long after doctors had gathered and healed my broken pieces. Every one of the loved ones who surrounded me were an example of Rich's challenge to allow myself to be known and loved, not in spite of, but because of my brokenness.

There are days when it is still brutally painful to experience moments of recognition of Rich. But sometimes, even in those moments, the skies split and I discover evidence of heaven — when I find glimpses of him in nature, when I see pieces of him in art, and as I encounter him in the lives of my fellow ragamuffins. I still weep when I read that Jonathan loved David "as his own soul." But it is in experiencing Rich's words where I find myself most, and isn't that the power, and the beauty, and the mystery of his music — finding parts of ourselves hidden in the lines of his poetry?

And for the snow that comes with winter,
For the growth that comes from pain,
For the joke I can't remember,
Although the laughter long remains,
For the faith that brought to finish
All I doubted at the start,
Lord, I give You praise for all that makes —
For the hatching of a heart....

Rich Mullins, "The Hatching of a Heart"

Twenty years later, I can barely read these words without them breaking my heart and driving me to my knees. But his music has always had that power — to break and to humble me — and I suppose that isn't such a bad place to be after all.

We go, "Wow, will I ever stop hurting?" My answer is, "Don't worry about hurting. Realize this is how badly God wants you." That hurt you are feeling, that emptiness you are feeling, maybe that's what it feels to be called by God. So don't try to fill it. Don't try to quiet it. Ask God to give you the courage to face that and walk through that to Him.

Rich Mullins

Skin on Skin

If you took the whole Bible, and you shook it around and melted it down and said, "What is the essence of what this whole thing is saying?" I think it would just be that God loves you very much. That God in fact is crazy about you.

Rich Mullins

Stories about Rich's vagabond lifestyle abound. His longtime producer and friend, Reed Arvin, recalls one such story from the height of Rich's career successes:

"Once, I met Rich for an early morning meeting at our record company. Rich had come in from Wichita. I found him standing alone by his suitcase in the parking lot.

'Where's your car?' I asked.

'Didn't drive.'

'So, what, you took a cab from the airport?'

'Didn't fly. I hitchhiked.'

It had taken him three days. He'd been dropped off at a breakfast place, was fed, and then walked to the label, suitcase in tow."

I wonder if Rich's "risky" behavior was an attempt — amid chart-topping radio singles, sold out shows, and substantial record sales — to keep his feet on the ground. As methods of communication advanced expeditionally, I wonder if Rich was making a decided effort to connect to others through these down-to-earth experiences and, through them, found a way to relate more closely with God.

We are all looking for real connection. More than ever before in human history, we are connected to each other. Through the phenomenal technological advancements of the last century — even the last twenty years — we can now relate to each other on various levels, in various ways, instantly. Whether we take the time to be cognizant of the implications of the Digital Age or not, the ability to communicate from anywhere, about anything, in real time, is quite awesome.