As I mentioned in my previous post, Rich Mullins wrote numerous articles for Release Magzine. These are online at http://www.kidbrothers.net/index-lo-res.html; I am putting key quotes from my favorite articles here, along with the date and title so you can read the whole thing on the COYN website (see link above). Please do read them; it's good stuff.
Summer 1992: Washing at Dusk (my favorite of the articles: "Right now it is dusk and far in the east the sky is already being inked with the shadow that our earth makes of itself and some nearer stars are waking there. I am in a park in Indianapolis, Indiana and right now these great trees are casting no shadows; the greens of their leaves are holding the last rays of sun already set and the sky in the west is bright and turquoise and it shines like a semi-precious stone - as if any stone could be "semi-precious". And over all that I can see, over my motorcycle and the trunks and limbs of these hardwood giants, over this close cut lawn and the now abandoned tennis courts and baseball diamonds, over the sky (still fading, still and newly exquisite) and over me, a great peace washes. It comes up from the ground and down from the heavens - a deep peace breathed out by a universe that surrounds itself again to the embrace of its Creator - its God, who is to be sought by His saints in the hours of early mornings but condescends to seek out even sinners at dusk and washes them at evening in the peace of His presence and throws round their shoulders the cloak of His acceptance and puts on their fingers the ring of His pleasure - the pleasure He takes in them when He meets them here on the road even before they could get home, when He echoes in the evening the hymn He sang for them at dawn."
Fall 1992: Making/Being Made: "Of course, what we make of the Bible will never be as great a thing as what the Bible will - if we let it - make of us."
Spring 1993: The Way We Were: "And if the cross is more than a symbol (and it is), and if grace is more than a sentiment (and, thank God, it is), if Jesus Christ is really God's revelation of Himself and not the product of human imagination (and He is), then we will become the children we once were and must become again. Stables will be temples, stars will be guarantees,'the trees of the fields will clap their hands and the mountains and the hills will break forth in singing...' We will pray and run and work and give ourselves over to faith. And God will be our Father and His Kingdom will be our home, for we will be those children we once were, and 'of such is the Kingdom of Heaven...' "
Summer 1993: The Flight of the Philistine: "We walk by faith and not by sight - not because we are blind, but because faith gives us the courage to face our fears and puts those fears in a context that makes them less frightful. We walk by faith and not by sight because there are places to go that cannot be seen and the scope of our vision is too small for our strides. Faith is not a denial of facts - it is a broadening of focus. It does not deny the hardness of guitar strings, it plucks them into a sweetness of sound."
May/June 1994: Playing Second Fiddle:
"Now, although a fiddle may never be fooled by the folly of human thinking, very much like us, they have pain. Their necks are stiff and their nerves, their strings, are stretched. They feel the friction of the bow and inside their beautiful brown little bodies they have only a little stick called a soundpost and an emptiness that seizes every inch of space - top to bottom, side to side. Their emptiness is for them (as it is for us) a nearly unbearable ache - an ache that is fitted to the shape that makes its tone. And sometimes a fiddle is tempted to fill that void with rags or glass or gold, even knowing that, if it should do that, it would never again resonate the intentions of its fiddler. It would never again be alive with his music. It would dull itself to the exquisite heat of the fiddler's will, the deliberate tenderness of his fingers.
And so, they resist. They resist so that they can respond.
Some fiddles have lived without eyes or ears or innards for a couple hundred years. They would die, though, if they were denied a fiddler."
Go read the articles.
For further reading:
Reflections of a Ragamuffin, by Rich Mullins
The Ragamuffin Gospel, by Brennan Manning
An Arrow Pointing to Heaven, by James Bryan Smith (bio of Rich Mullins, quite good)
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