Remembering a Ragamuffin

I don't write on Saturday's. Day off and such. And I know there won't be many readers of this.

But I had to. The words wouldn't stay inside.

Yesterday I watched a DVD about the life of Rich Mullins, and oh, my I was taken back to a different life and a different time. My own.

It's good to remember sometimes.

Rich and I have a long and deep history, as every day readers know. He forces himself into my conversations quite often. Without him, frankly, I might not be where I am.

I knew something about his own history, but not all of it. Till I saw the film. And I know know that he struggled every bit as much as I have over time. He had father issues (check). He had difficulty with substances (check). He was creative to a fault (well, me not as much ). He was a rebel as far as churches go, though he certainly spent a great deal of time in them (check). And he loved his creator, though he wanted to know him in a new and more vibrant way since he was young. (yeah, check).

But I didn't know how much he struggled with loneliness and even depression. I cried three times in the film. Once, when he struggled to get a recording contract and apparently played music executives the song I've picked as the key one at my funeral, Elijah. Again, when he lost his father-figure and showed up at a funeral drunk. And finally when he played and sang one of the first contemporary songs I ever sang in church, Hold Me Jesus.

See, when I came to Jesus 18 years ago, one night I was fiddling with the radio in my bedroom and I came across a radio station that played contemporary Christian music. I didn't know such a thing existed. I heard a guy named Gary Chapman with a single called Sweet, Sweet Mercy. Turns out he was married to a woman singer named Amy Grant who sang a song called Sing Your Praise to the Lord. Turns out that was written by a man named Rich Mullins.

Rich was killed in 1997, on a Saturday. I was working at The Times-Picayune that night. I was at my desk very late in the evening when I saw the very short notice that Rich Mullins, writer of Awesome God, had been killed in an automobile accident.

I was stunned. For lo these many years later I've every once in a while tried to get clarity to why God would take such a talent as he and live such a man as me. Makes no sense to me. But I've been told by many that one day I will understand the plan. Maybe so.

Rich didn't just sing, write and play. He spoke. Of Christianity, he said, “Christianity is not about building an absolutely secure little niche in the world where you can live with your perfect little wife and your perfect little children in your beautiful little house where you have no gays or minority groups anywhere near you. Christianity is about learning to love like Jesus loved and Jesus loved the poor and Jesus loved the broken.” 

He said of ministry, a field I eventually found myself in in all the ways one can find oneself, "I would like to encourage you to stop thinking of what you're doing as ministry. Start realizing that your ministry is how much of a tip you leave when you eat in a restaurant; when you leave a hotel room whether you leave it all messed up or not; whether you flush your own toilet or not. Your ministry is the way that you love people. And you love people when you write something that is encouraging to them, something challenging. You love people when you call your wife and say, 'I'm going to be late for dinner,' instead of letting her burn the meal. You love people when maybe you cook a meal for your wife sometime, because you know she's really tired. Loving people - being respectful toward them - is much more important than writing or doing music.” 

Perhaps most famously, he said, "“So go out and live real good and I promise you'll get beat up real bad. But, in a little while after you're dead, you'll be rotted away anyway. It's not gonna matter if you have a few scars. It will matter if you didn't live.” 

Rich was saved by a man named Brennan Manning, a prophet of a writer whose Ragamuffin Gospel has been my way of the spiritual warrior over the years (read it, please, please stop these ramblings and go buy you a copy and put it in your library next to the Bible and C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity). Years ago I wrote a book called One Man, One Cross about my little anonymous journey into faith. I sent Brennan, who just happened to live in New Orleans, a copy. He was very kind enough to read the book, then send me one of his that hadn't even been published and he signed it to me. I treasure that book.

We are, it seems to me, all joined at the hip that God injured of Jacob. If you could put up a board big enough, you could follow all the clues and all the connections in big ol' red ink. We're all connected, right back to that time when there was one.  I can't fathom much of what has happened to me over these long number of years, but I know that God has plans. I really, really do. And I believe, though folks often tell me I shouldn't, that we are all here for a reason. I believe I try, really do try, to stay with the wave of God as it flows through time and life.

God saved me. Rich just showed me that all my stereotypes about church didn't have to continue to exist. Rich showed me you could worship how you wanted or needed to. Rich showed me that you could write what you feel and you would feel what you write.