the rich mullins entry

"It's time to write it," she said. "Look at it this way. Think of your life backwords, starting on the last day. Don't you want to have more time to spend with it? It's time."

I just bid on ebay and won. It's a concert video from summer 1997 in Lufkin. I paid a little too much. But how can you put a price on it now?

Do you want me to start at the beginning? Are you sure?

When I was 11(?) and Vivian was 13 we liked Michael W. Smith and Amy Grant. Their lyrics rhymed and they played things like the piano and the guitar. They were also normatively groomed in photos on the cover of the cassettes (yes. cassettes.)

On our local Christian radio station we heard something New, there was this guy playing a hammer dulcimer. (intentional run-on, that; settle down.) We were intrigued. My dad bought the album. There was some guitar and piano too, of course, but this hammer dulcimer was like nothing I had ever heard. This music was Alive. Also, the meaning of the lyrics was not always immediately apparent. They were, as we say for lack of a better term, Deep. They kept one thinking for awhile. The album itself was entitled "The World as Best as I Remember It, Vol. 1," which (at that time, at least) seemed intriguing. Also, this guy, this Christian singer? He had long hair.

So we pretty much fell in love right away, Vivian and I (and my other family members too) in, as far as I can tell, exactly the same way because our behavior was pretty much the same. Rich Mullins became, in the very truest sense of the word, Sacred music to us. Why do we call some of the old musics sacred? Like Bach? Because they are so much bigger than us that they can't be taken out by those foolish tendencies we have to oversimplify, sentimentalize, or simply "move on." If that is the right definition of Sacred, then this was it. There were unspoken Rules, things that were so true and so obvious that they would never need to be said- you didn't talk while listening. You just Listened. As a matter of fact, I can remember relatively few actual conversations about Rich Mullins because we simply didn't need to talk about it or him. It was too Real for that.

"I can't do it," I said. "There's just no way I can do it. Even if I started now and worked on this every day for the rest of my life, it would never be complete, it would never be finished, it would never be right. And of all the things that could happen, that would be the worse- to write about this poorly."

Vivian and I bought more albums and kept listening. We got newer albums and then went back and got the older ones. We listened so many times that most of the lettering wore off the cassettes and we had to identify them by the tiniest of marks, like secret symbols legible only to the members of our peculiar fellowship. Radio occurrences, especially songs on albums not yet obtained, were precious. At some point the internet was invented and we discovered that, indeed, there WERE other folks out there who realized that this music was something different, something beyond... although not all were quite as passionate. I excitedly emailed one supposedly dedicated fan with a list of my "favorite" Rich Mullins songs, a list that I think included no less than 3 dozen of those illustrious titles. He emailed back and said that I needed to "get out more."

In the summer of 1994, right before I started high school, my youth group went on a week-long missions trip to Tse Bonito, New Mexico, to do volunteer work on the Navajo reservation. We took a seemingly infinite bus ride to reach this tiny out-in-the-desert town (which wikipedia, that ever-trustful reference, reports as having a population of 262 in 2000). Upon arriving, I was in for a bit of a shock. First, I heard the local pastor/missions director say ever so casually, "Rich Mullins was here a couple of weeks ago,"

(and in case you can't tell by this point, my head immediately screamed on the inside RICH MULLINS WAS HERE TWO WEEKS AGO!! THIS IS REALLY BAD TIMING!)

but then the REAL shock came by what he said next. He said that Rich was PLANNING TO MOVE THERE SOON. (Only he said it like, "And he's planning to move here soon... nice weather, isn't it?")

After they scraped my flattened and limp body off the ground, I walked around a little dazed all week. Somehow I was saved from the bitterness of the irony of the situation by some kind of divine grace. This came to me as a comfort, a metaphor for life: of course I had missed Rich Mullins. The creation continues in labor until now. All is Frustration, etc. It seemed to make sense to me, in its way. That's just how life is, above all, intricately and exquisitely frustrating. But this was an idea that would grow to fruition as the years went on.

(Before you laud my precocious maturity, I should mention that I did give outlet to my strong emotions on the matter by asserting calmly, confidently, and repeatedly that really it was no problem if we had Just Missed Rich Mullins, because I was, in fact, going to Marry him when I grew up. This embarrassed my sister to no end.)

At some point in these years, can't remember exactly when, I called our local Christian radio station. Did they have an address for Rich Mullins? They did! I wrote him a letter, I told him everything, completely poured out my heart, and sent it off to Witchita. It came back a week or two later, address unknown.

And then the day came when there would be a concert, a concert near Houston! And of course we went, and I think, like a little child at Disneyworld, I can't really remember anything from that concert because if I did remember, my mind would shine so brightly all the time with the memories that I would be blinded from the inside out. I'll tell you, in the spirit of Total Insufficiency of this discourse, that the concert was Good. The internets inform me that this event took place on Sept. 22, 1995, if that information is significant to any of you. But what I really want to tell you about is what happened right after the concert.

There was going to be an autograph session at a local Christian bookstore! So we begged and of course our parents couldn't say no to a request this big, even though it was already late. So off to the bookstore we went, and got in the amazingly long line. And waited. And... waited. The problem was that Rich and the other musicians hadn't even arrived yet to get the line started. Finally (around midnight I think), our ever-patient parents suggested that we just couldn't wait any longer, we needed to go home. I think Vivian was greatly disappointed, but I was not. I? I was a child resigned to the disappointments and shortcomings of this ever-frustrating world.

But Then. Just as I crawled into the tiny corner of the backseat of our ginormous van, I looked out the window and saw... I don't know quite how to say this... the back of Carolyn Arend's pants, like 2 inches from my face. You see, Carolyn had been in concert with Rich, and she had been wearing a very... distinctive pair of print leggings or stirrup pants or something (remember, the early 90's were quite recent) with a design that couldn't be forgotten. AND I WAS LOOKING RIGHT AT THEM.

AND RICH MULLINS WAS GETTING OUT OF THE JEEP WITH HER.

Which meant, that right at that particular moment, RICH MULLINS' PERSONAL VEHICLE WAS PARKED IN THE SPACE IMMEDIATELY ADJACENT TO OUR OWN PERSONAL VEHICLE.

(a moment of silence)

So there he was, in the flesh, and he said hi to us, and we were all just kind of stunned. And then we needed to find a pen so he could autograph our liner notes, and we looked for a pen, and RICH MULLINS WAS STANDING RIGHT THERE AND WE COULD NOT FIND A PEN. So he was very polite and nice, I really have no idea what he said, maybe something like "did you enjoy the concert?" and we said yes, still all frantically searching for a pen. And after a minute he was like, "Well, I guess I'd better get in there..." and at that very instant my mom or dad managed to find a pen somewhere in the van, and he wrote what he always writes, "Be God's." And then he went on.

I don't think I said anything to him, because, you see, I didn't really care about getting his autograph. I didn't want his name in ink on a piece of paper to oogle over, I wanted to talk to him, not for a minute but for an hour, or preferably for a day or a few days, becuase it would really take a long time to say what I wanted to say. What did I want to say? I wanted to say, "Thank you for transforming my spiritual life. Thank you for writing songs that give words to all these feelings we have about nature and the beauty of Creation and the glory of the Creator, these feelings that are always so locked inside of me, so pressing to be expressed. Thank you for not giving pat answers and cheap ideas in your lyrics. Thank you for creating beautiful music to go with them. Thanks for being who you are." Those aren't things you can quite get out, standing in the parking lot at midnight.

I just remembered. He was barefoot in that parking lot.

I have to go to bed but you've waited long enough for this entry, so I'll post this and then there will be a part 2.

Love, Neb