The World as Best as I can Remember It

March 13, 2012 | By | 9 Comments

The book “An Arrow Pointing to Heaven” describes an odd habit singer Rich Mullins cultivated during a music tour. The activity is described like this:

During a concert tour in 1989, Rich performed the same ritual every night before going onstage. He had a dry-erase board and some markers. Each night he drew a map of the earth and outlined the continents and then started filling in the countries. He would do this at a fast and furious pace until the tour manager told him it was time to go on. Then he would stop and write these words above the map: “This is the world as best as I can remember it, by Rich Mullins.”

That phrase, The World As Best as I can Remember It, went on to become the title of a two volume Mullin’s album in 1993.  The first volume included a song titled “Jacob and Two Women” which also used the same phrase. It is a strange strong with lyrics that are difficult to decipher. Mullins noted that people always came up to him saying that they didn’t get the song. He responded he wasn’t quite sure he understood the song either.* However, it also happened to be one of the most beautiful songs Mullins ever crafted.

As part of the song, Mullins includes the lyrics “Seems that love comes for just a moment and then it passes on by”.  Though technically a song about the Biblical characters Jacob, Rachel and Leah, it’s not too far-reaching to assume that Mullins was writing about his own life as well. After all, Mullins was engaged to be married to a women he dearly loved until his fiancee called off the wedding. When the subject was broached in an interview, Mullins had this to say:

I have no interest in anybody else and she is married to someone else, so that’s the way it goes, and I don’t mind that. Right now I cannot imagine that life could be happier married than it is single, so I’m not in a panic about getting married. And I think, you know, maybe God wanted me to be celibate and the way that he accomplished that was to break my heart. So, that’s the way it goes.

Thus it went with Rich Mullins. He remained single until dying in a tragic car accident at age 41. I suppose it might have been easier for Rich to try and bury the memories. After all, things didn’t really work out for him in the end. I suppose it also would have been easy for him to become bitter at God and the woman he loved. Instead, he was oddly at peace. In the end, he trusted that God was good and trustworthy, no matter the shape of his broken heart.

This isn’t to say that Rich didn’t struggle or have questions. One of his most stunning and gut-wrenching songs (Hard to Get) includes these opening lines:

You who live in heaven
Hear the prayers of those of us who live on earth
Who are afraid of being left by those we love
And who get hardened by the hurt

I’m glad that Rich did not let his heart become hardened. If he had, I would have missed out on some of the most beautiful music ever produced. Instead, he allowed his empty heart to remember and hope, even as it ached. In the book, The World As I Remember It: Through the Eyes of a Ragamuffin, Rich had this to say:

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 sound-post 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 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.

Allow me to tweak one of the lines to the song “Jacob and Two Women”. I’ve replaced the words “him” with “her” and put Rich in the position of Leah. I think it makes a lot more sense in this context.  Though Rich might not have realized it, I think he identified with the story so much because he was actually writing about himself.

And his sky is just a petal pressed in a book of a memory
Of the time she thought she loved him and they kissed
And his friends say, “Ah, she’s a devil”
But he says, “No, she is a dream”
This is the world as best as I can remember it

*http://www.kidbrothers.net/interviews/ccmjun92.html

Category: Gallery, Musings

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  1. “Jacob and 2 Women” – Deep Tracks #11 – Sully's Music Journal | September 17, 2022
  1. roxy says:

    Great post. I took a photo that I had saved of Rich and pubished it online, more people have shared it than I ever expected. Rich may not have been loved like he wanted to be but he was loved. Somehow he heard music that the rest of us can’t hear. He is like the only dog that could see color… only he was human and he heard heaven.

    • Mark says:

      Roxy,

      That is incredibly cool! How did you get the picture? Did you know Rich???

      PS: Thanks for still visiting my blog! I’m sad that I haven’t had the time to update it in so long.

      • roxy says:

        Mark,
        My Aunt met Rich once but that is as close as I ever got to meeting him. I got the picture from an image search, it was from the book “the world as I remember it.” I like because he is laughing.

        🙂 God Bless.

  2. Nolan Martin says:

    Very encouraging. Just became a real fan of Rich Mullins last year, never really knew his backstory and the relationship thing. Being a single adult, Rich is a hero of mine. I had my heart broke last year and still am fighting some bitterness about it. Nothing like this, I’d like to know how Rich kept from becoming angry and bitter towards his ex, ( She ended up getting divorced actually, part of me thinks, Well, She deserved it.

    • Mark says:

      Hey Nolan, thanks for your message. It’s always great to get comments, especially from strangers. Mullins is a hero of mine as well. Another interesting song he wrote on this topic is “We are not as strong as we think we are”, which he called “the most honest love song I could write”. Your message reminded me of another great Mullins quote:

      If you try to have faith, you will be attacked by doubts you never knew you were capable of. But you keep on believing, even if you fall, even if you struggle with doubts, you keep on believing. And if you live a life that is marked by hope, by the belief that God is good, and there is goodness in the world that awaits us, you’ll be disappointed. You’ll be crushed, even, sometimes. The Scriptures say hope deferred makes the heart grow sick. You’re gonna have a sick heart. But you keep on hoping. And if you choose to love, you will be misunderstood, you will be betrayed, you will be rejected by the people who most desperately need the love you have to offer… but you keep on loving.

  3. John says:

    Nice post. The part about the fiddle very moving. I wrote about that in my blog, I have pasted a link for you

    As you can see from the blog, Rich’s life, by the grace of Jesus, has left its mark.

    “Be God’s”

  4. Chip says:

    Mark, as a Rich Mullins fan since 1989, I think you have some good thoughts here. I’ve always seen this song as Rich taking a biblical story and drawing out observations about common human concerns from it, as he was so often wont to do. For this reason, it makes sense that this song is paired with “The Howling” on TWABAIRI Volume One, as both songs deal with different types of injustices, and are preceded by the comfort of “Where You Are.”

    However, your personal angle with Rich’s loss of love certainly also is true, and “The River” off of the same album deals with it more directly (and really puts Rich’s heartbreak on full display). Rich would also, relatedly but conversely, write about the loss of his closest friend to marriage in “What Susan Says.”

    Peace of Christ to you.

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