can i just say, rich mullins was an incredible man. in the past two days that i've been researching him i have been challenged, inspired, and redirected. BB: Speaking of your music, one of my favorite songs is "Damascus Road," and I do understand that that came out of a painful time in your life. Give us an idea of that time as you wrote that song. RM: Yeah, I wrote that right after my ex-fiance called off our engagement, and I just sort of did it as an act of obedience. Because I was going, you know you're supposed to.. The hebrew people were required to say, "The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away, blessed be the name of the Lord" when a tragedy happened. So I thought, well, you know I need to do something along those lines. So I decided to just thank God. It was sort of a writing exercise. But by the time I was over, what I realized was once again so often we think how our life is gonna go and what the Lord owes us and how it's supposed to be. And sometimes God has better things in mind or something different in mind for us than what we have in mind for ourselves. And the job of the Christian, which is why writing is so much like praying, and why praying is so vital to a real Christian spiritual life. The job of a Christian is to keep themselves open to God and always recognize that God is greater than we are. And that nothing happens outside of His will. Some things He causes, some things He permits, and there's a whole lot of theology behind that that people love to argue about. I kinda go, the long and short of all of it is that if I believe that God is good, then I need to accept whatever happens to me in life as being a gift. And allow Him to take some of the things that hurt, allow Him to take some of the things that sting, some of the things that I think are going to kill me - allow Him to take those things and make of me the person He wants me to be. It may not be the person I want to be, but it'll be the person He would want me to be. And I think when we realize who we are in Christ - when we mature in our identity as being His creature that we find that we're much more at home with ourselves in Him than we are in that false idea of who we thought we were. (where RM is Rich Mullins) posted by testimonies 4:49 PM Add a comment . . .
