Rich Mullins stood upon a hill among castle ruins in Ireland. His friend and photographer, Ben Pearson, was standing below. Ben called out, “Lift up your arms,” and Rich raised his arms to shoulder level as if making a cross and said, “You mean, like Jesus?” Ben yelled up, “No, lower.” Rich dropped his arms a little, and suddenly Ben saw something he did not expect. From a distance Rich looked like an arrow pointing toward the sky. Ben yelled, “You look like an arrow, man. An arrow pointing in the right direction.” He snapped the picture. It would be the final picture of the last photo shoot for Rich and Ben.
It was more than a picture. It was the summation of a person’s life, a symbol that said more about who he was than mere words can. Rich Mullins was a man who stood among the ruins—the ruins created by his own faults and failings, the ruins that result from the ravages of time. In the midst of the ruins he pointed to heaven, to the God who bundles our brokenness and heals our wounds. He felt the winds of heaven as he stood upon the stuff of earth and pointed, through his words and his music, to something larger than even our dreams. Rich Mullins was an arrow pointing to heaven.
Most people know him through his songs. He wrote and recorded dozens of hit songs in contemporary Christian music. If you meet someone who does not know Rich’s name, simply mentioning the song “Awesome God” will usually result in a smile and a response such as, “Oh, I know that song. We sing it in our church.” According to his peers in the Christian music industry—Amy Grant, Michael W. Smith, Gary Chapman, Phil Keaggy, and a host of others—Rich’s songs are some of the most beautiful and inspiring ever written.
But what most people do not know is the person behind the lyrics and the music. I wish that Rich were here to tell you himself; I wish you had the chance to get to know him, to listen to what he had to say, and to see how he lived. Unfortunately, Rich died in a car accident on September 19, 1997. Unless you were able to spend time with him, to draw close enough to understand his thoughts and witness how he expressed them, to see how he lived and listen to what he thought, his life is unknown to you. That is the reason for this book.
HOW THIS BOOK CAME TO BE
A year after Rich died, many people approached his family and said, “Someone ought to write a book about Rich.” After a lot of discussion and debate as to whether or not it would be beneficial, the family agreed that his life merited being written about. In the fall of 1998, Rich’s brother, David, asked if I would be interested in working on such a project. I was deeply honored. I was a close friend of Rich’s during the final years of his life. We became friends in 1990, and he lived with my wife, Meghan, and me from 1992 to 1995. In 1995 Rich left to live and minister on a Navajo reservation in the southwest, but in a sense, he never left our home. He returned every few months, leaving his scent of patchouli and a few of his belongings scattered throughout our house.
Rich lived with us during what I believe were some of the best times in his life. He had come to Wichita, Kansas, and was attending Friends University, a small, Christian, liberal arts college. Rich was finishing his degree in music education so he could teach music to children on a Native American reservation. He lived with his writing partner and close friend, David Strasser (better known as Beaker) in a small house in town. I began teaching at Friends the same year Rich
