And he goes, "Oh, like Jesus?"
I managed to get some letters and other stuff done today so I kind of let myself go veg out surfing the net for stuff written on Rich Mullins. There's a lot...and I guess it's 'cause he wasn't your average cheesy Christian artist. I feel almost cheated that I only heard about him after he had died (and never got to go to any of his concerts...lol).
I remember it was one day maybe four years ago, Matt, Tach and I were all squashed in the front cab of the ute driving back from the mailbox (it's half an hour away from our house--so in reality about an hour round-trip just to get the mail), and we were looking through all of the new CDs that had just come from this big order we'd done through Koorong.
Anyhow, somehow Tach had known about Rich Mullins and so when we had been flicking through the Koorong mag picking out CDs she'd said he had to get The Jesus Record. I hadn't heard of him and as a 12-yr old thought the picture of Jesus on the cross on the front didn't look overly inviting, but still I put in my few dollars worth to get it. As it went, Tach pulled out the little slip where they write all of the lyrics and read off the paragraph about Rich having died in a car accident and how his band the Ragamuffins had decided to go ahead and produce the CD he'd been working on.
When I understand something more about an artist I always have more of a motivation (and often more understanding of their lyrics and music) to sit down and really listen to their songs. So it was with, Rich. He was dead, but I was intrigued by the image of a man who "On Setptember 10, 1997, sat down in an old, abandoned church and played nine songs that were to be part of a record he had affectionately termed "Ten Songs About Jesus." This was a new project Rich was just starting called "The Jesus Record," a project Rich said was "needed"-for himeslf and his friends. Just nine short days later, Rich left this world and went to meet jesus, His Saviour and Lord."
I can't think of the word to describe how I felt about a guy sitting in an old, abandoned church singing songs about Jesus...except that it showed me how much this life is about having a personal relationship with Jesus. Before you come to the part about fellowshiping with other believers; before you come to the part about sitting down with the little girl in the street to give her a hug and let her feel God's love; it's about sitting down at an old out of tune piano in an abandoned church having your words to Jesus echo in the empty room before mingling with the song of the birds in worship to the Saviour.
So, we eventually got home and went scrambling to gather every CD player we had in the house to try and listen to as many of our new CDs at once as we could. I really got hooked on Michael W. Smith's album Live the Life, but it was the lyrics of The Jesus Record that made me seriously made me think. The whole thing of internet surfing was pretty new to me at that point, still I ended up spending a few nights reading through pages on Rich Mullins. Because I didn't know anything about Rich Mullins most of what people who saying (this was only about a year after his death so there was heaps of memorial kind of notes and stuff) I didn't fully get, but there was this one thing that his producer Reed Arvin said really stuck with me about how Rich never knew how much money he made.
Reed Arvin: One day I asked Rich a question that wouldn't normally be appropriate, but after eight records you've gone through all the appropriate topics a long time earlier. I said, "Bro, what's a typical quarter for you in writing income," 'cause songwriters get paid every quarter. And he said, "I don't know." And I said, "You don't know?" Which kinda didn't surprise me, because he was so flaky, especially about that kind of thing. So I was trying to lead him to the answers, I said, "Well, don't the checks come to your house?"
He said, "No, they don't."
I said, "Where do they go?"
"They go to my church."
"Why do they go to your church?"
"Well, they go to this board of elders that kinda heads over my ministry. And I'm paid the average annual salary (whatever a working man in America is for whatever year it is - I think that year it was like $24,600) and everything else is either given away or used for retirement or whatever. If I knew how much it was, it'd be so much harder to give it away."
That stunned me. 'Cause I'm rather a hoarder when it comes to money. Dad used to put my allowance straight into my bank account so as a little kid I knew I had money, but I never saw it in my hand. Then as the hundreds began to pile up it kind of became a game in my mind to see how much I could save up. I don't think I was convinced to part with any of it until after I'd almost reached 1,000 bucks. I couldn't really comprehend then how a guy who probably earned hundreds of thousands a year could give almost all of it up. I suddenly realised that hoarding up money wasnt' a game to me anymore, it was this unhealthy attachment of greed. And my attitude to things that I owned was no better. Alot of the time it still isn't. That short story, though, challenged me to work on my attitude.
It means that I've had to come to hold onto something else so that my fingers would release their hold on money and things I own. I've had to come to hold onto Jesus' love, so that I could learn that there's more joy in saying to my litl'le sister when she asks that, "Sure you can wear my shirt," and have fun seeing how much it makes her feel grown up to wear my cloths, then in knowing that my shirt is safely in my draw where it won't get ripped. 'Cause when you decide to look at life through the eyes of eternity you suddenly realise just how silly it is to hold onto things like cloths when it's the riches that get stored up in Heaven that we'll be living with forever.
Tacked on later...BTW, naturally this post went exactly where I didn't expect it to go. I was just wanting to tell about Rich Mullins, but oh, well I seem to have failed miserably at that *roll*, but I did just find this great article by CCM that explains a lot of what he was. Go read it ;)
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