Tag: rich mullins

Poetry & Words, Theology

And I’ll Sing in the Land of my Sojourn

Gina @ Oaxacaborn

And I'll Sing in the Land of My Sojourn by Gina Munsey on Oaxacaborn, with quotes by Rich Mullins and Frederick BuechnerIt’s quiet, at least as quiet as an afternoon can be on the second floor of an apartment building, perched at the edge, where the gully dips down into rain-soaked grass and back up again to meet the ragged blacktop edge just before the toll booth.  This little corner of earth where residential and interstate meet is not a destination or a landmark, but I think Rich Mullins would have sung about it [1].

I think he’d have seen the gold in the way the sun fights for light here, like a farmer sees hope and life in the tiniest green shoot.

Maybe he’d have heard a melody in the rumble of the trucks which coast and pull their rattling brake just before the bend in the road, like he did when he sang “And the coal trucks come a-runnin’  / With their bellies full of coal  / And their big wheels a-hummin’  / Down this road that lies open like the soul of a woman…” [2]

He saw beauty, somehow, where others only saw the tired corners, where others only saw the afternoon traffic jams and the faded street signs and the plodding of sojourners down the cracked and uneven sidewalks. When you know everything around you lies in shadow, waiting for the great awakening, when you know we’re all living just on the very cusp of seeing clearly and not through a glass dimly, well, then, there’s beauty in everything broken. Because as soon as that Star shown down into the stable and as soon as He was born, well, redemption was set in motion and that was “When the old world started dying / And the new world started coming on”. [3]

There have been sojourners as long as there has been time itself, mendicants wandering [4] yet wandering with purpose, through the dredges that are made holy with that same purpose. Sojourning is different than drudgery. Drudgery is repetition without hope on a horizontal plane. But sojourning! Ah, sojourning takes the repetition in which drudgery despairs, and views it with eyes opened by the God of Wonder Himself.

“If you think you are seeing the same show all over again seven times a week,” Frederick Buechner writes [5], “you’re crazy. Every morning you wake up to something that in all eternity never was before and never will be again. And the you that wakes up was never the same before and will never be the same again.”

And so, in the midst of the traffic chorus outside my window, and the unwashed laundry and  the unanswered emails, in the midst of confronting evil and doubt, in the midst of working long into the night and consoling a child’s fever and answering unspoken fears, in between the lost moments of sleep and the sunrises awash with new mercies and endless grace, in the arms of everlasting love, “I’ll sing my song / and I’ll sing my song / in the land of my sojourn.”[6]

Poetry & Words, Theology

Rich Mullins, the Homeless Man

Gina @ Oaxacaborn

Rich Mullins, Ireland, Photograph by Ben Pearson
Image Credit: Ben Pearson

September 19, 1997. Seventeen years ago. Seventeen years ago, Rich Mullins walked right out of this earth and slipped out of his body and right up through the veil that the Cross had already split apart for him and for us all. Seventeen years ago he went “out like Elijah, with a whirlwind in a chariot of fire”, just like he used to sing.

It was seventeen years ago, and I remember exactly where I was standing in the kitchen in the middle of a tiny town in Wisconsin, and how the words echoed out of the little fridge-top radio when I heard that he had flown. And I remember how I was just a teenager and just figuring things out, and how I wore out my Rich Mullins cassette tapes that year, until you couldn’t even hear the scratchy songs anymore. A little later, I sat in the basement of a tiny church and listened to Mitch McVicker, who was with Rich in the fatal car accident, sing songs from Rich’s posthumous album, The Jesus Record. Tears streamed down my face and into my heart and I knew Jesus was my own deliverer, my very own, and I knew right then and forever, “He will never break His promise, He has written it upon the sky.” And then later still, when I was yet again a little older but still figuring things out, I didn’t even get a chance to wear out An Arrow Pointing to Heaven because I kept giving my copy away and buying another one.

I can’t even tell you what passages or words or songs of his mean the most, because how can you pull out one line from a poet’s canon and separate it out from all the rest and say, “This is it.” You can’t. It doesn’t work that way. In the documentary “Homeless Man: The Restless Heart of Rich Mullins“, Father Simon said, “And I think that’s one thing that Rich and Saint Francis had in common is that they were both poets. They both had a vision and they were both willing to live that vision. Their poem was their life, not so much what they wrote.”

When Rich sang of Abraham “how one star he saw had been lit for me, he was a stranger in this land, and I am that, no less than he,” I could see the sojourning thread that ties us all together. Being one of Abraham’s stars and having roots all over, but none deep in one place, can sometimes feel like the edge of being from nowhere, the edge of not belonging. But we’re pilgrims, all. Rich was a sojourner and Jesus was a sojourner — and if the Son of Man sometimes didn’t have a place to rest His head and that detail didn’t mess up redemption one bit, then I know that anything that happens to me is gonna be okay, too.

And this man — who was once mistaken for homeless outside a church before one of his concerts — this man really was the single most influential person I’ve never met. He’s where I learned that this life is a little crazy and it’s a little hard; but nothing, really nothing, of earthly value worth holding on to that tightly, anyway. We’re not put here to pretend to be perfect, and piece together these unblemished lives and create a nice bubble for ourselves, we’re here to be real.

And to be alive.

And love and live with wild abandon.

And stand up loudly in the land of our sojourn, not caring what anyone thinks, and just be those wild arrows, pointing straight to heaven.

“Nobody tells you when you get born here
How much you’ll come to love it
And how you’ll never belong here
So I call you my country
And I’ll be lonely for my home
And I wish that I could take you there with me

…When the old world started dying
And the new world started coming on
And I’ll sing His song, and I’ll sing His song
In the land of my sojourn

In the land of my sojourn
And I will sing His song
In the land of my sojourn.”

And in that new world, I think, music will be danced out across the strings of a hammered dulcimer.

LISTEN NOW to Land of my Sojourn, I’ll Carry On, and Elijah.

Inspiration, Life in Photos, Poetry & Words, Theology

I write because

Gina @ Oaxacaborn

I write, sometimes, because of things I see and hear,
and other times, I write because the sound is muffled and my vision is blurred,
but mostly, I write because (the veil is still there,
the glass is still dim,
He has not yet come)
and I want to see clearly.

It's the world as best as I remember it
I write because...

“Can a man see God face to face and live?

Can I not see an eclipse better through a pinhole in a paper than without it?

We can’t so much see light as we can see things because of it. So I do not meet God in a vacuum — I meet Him in the world He has provided for me to meet Him in — in a world of events and of places, of history (time and space), in a world of lives of people and their records of their encounters.

I meet God in this world — in the world of these things…

…and this is the world as best as I can remember it.”
-Rich Mullins

Inspiration

if there is any meaning…

Gina @ Oaxacaborn

“If there is any meaning in the life of Jesus of Nazareth, it is this: that there is a God who create us, and who loves us so much that he would stop at nothing to bring us to him. And I really suspect that of all things that we want to know, the only thing we really need to know is that we are loved. And if Jesus means anything, he means that you are loved. I hope you know that. And I hope you stop worrying about all the stuff that you don’t know, because I don’t think it amounts to  a hill of beans.” –Rich Mullins

Life in Photos

“there’s a joy in your sweet abandon, like the cowgirl ballerina”

Gina @ Oaxacaborn

i just adore my little family. we are unbelievably blessed. when i look at her bright eyes, i can’t help think of this beautiful rich mullins song:

26PM Josiah Munsey and baby girl Aveline Alenka -- father and daughter photo

“O Eli
There’s a sanctity in your innocence
A certain beauty and no uncertain strength
That brings me to the faith
I don’t know if I
If I am climbing to or falling in
But it comes like grace from your tiny hands
When I hold you in mine

And I pray that the eyes
Of your heart
Shine bright
With the hope to which you’re called
And may you know with all the saints
The height ~ the depth ~ the width ~ and the length
Of the love of God

O Eli
There’s a joy in your sweet abandon
Like the cowgirl ballerina
Leaves that ride
The wild and holy bucking wind that the sky
Sent through you to blow away these walls I’ve built
Walls of selfishness and walls of guilt
That leave me free to be a child

And I pray that the eyes
Of your heart
Shine bright
With the hope to which you’re called”

Poetry & Words

somewhere beyond all this.

Gina @ Oaxacaborn

i don’t do this thing called writing, anymore. i wake up more tired than the night before, curl my hair into corporate correctness, and box myself in underneath a sickly white glow of flickering fluorescence. i click and add and think and click and everyone once in a while, my chair creaks. i stare at textured tan cubicle lining and my feet inside pointy-toed heels don’t even have room to stretch.

then, i return home and burst into tears at the laundry and the dusty floor, too tired to even eat properly, and turn around and do it all again.

“If she had wings she would fly away and another day God will give her some,” sings James Blunt.

I sigh.

Then Rich Mullins’ voice soars and I can feel the hope inside me returning, the Hope of my Solid Assurance in my Papa God, and Rich sings, “I know that Your Spirit is leading me somewhere beyond all this.”

And I collapse into the arms of my husband and feel the Heavenly Father’s embrace, and know I can do it all again tomorrow for the JOY that is set before me.