There is a moment in the film Ragamuffin where you stop watching a movie and start watching a mirror. Rich Mullins was barefoot, restless, brilliant, and broken and somehow more surrendered to God than most polished pews will ever produce. He did not fit the mold of the Christian celebrity he accidentally became. He gave away his royalties, moved to a Navajo reservation, and lived on little more than what a Navajo family might earn. He was, by every worldly measure, a non-conformist.
And perhaps that is exactly what holiness looks like when it is the real thing.
We have dressed holiness up for so long that we barely recognize it when it shows up barefoot. We expect it to be tidy and triumphant, well-spoken and well-funded. But the saints who have left the deepest marks on the kingdom tend to look more like Rich Mullins than a keynote speaker at a conference. They are people who got so close to Jesus that the world stopped making sense to them.
Rich said it plainly: “I think I would rather live on the verge of falling, and let my security be in the all-sufficiency of the grace of God, than to live in some kind of pietistic illusion of moral excellence.”
That is not a man chasing comfort. That is a man chasing God.
He also said: “I take comfort in knowing that it was the shepherds to whom the angels appeared when they announced Christ’s birth. Invariably throughout the course of history, God has appeared to people on the fringes. It’s nice to find theological justification for your quirks.”
We smile at that. But underneath the humor is something profound. God has always chosen the unlikely, the overlooked, the ones who do not quite fit. The ragamuffins. The barefoot ones. The ones sitting at rickety pianos in torn jeans when everyone else is dressed up and playing it safe.
Romans 12:2 says it this way: “Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” Non-conformity is not a personality type. It is a posture of the soul. It is what happens when we are so filled with the Spirit that the things the world offers simply lose their appeal.
Rich Mullins lost his appeal for fame, for affluence, for the polished version of Christian life long before he died on that Kansas highway in 1997. What he never lost was his appetite for God. And maybe that is the whole point.
Holiness is not about being better than everyone else. It is about being so in love with Jesus that you are willing to be different for His sake. To give when the world hoards. To serve when the world climbs. To sit quietly with the poor when the world chases the platform.
Rich left us this: “Be God’s.” Just two words. Written in autographs, spoken from stages, whispered in the quiet of a life that did not look like success but somehow smelled like the kingdom.
We do not need more polished Christians. We need more ragamuffins. More barefoot believers who are too busy loving Jesus to worry about what anyone thinks of them.
So today we ask ourselves the question Rich Mullins quietly asked with his whole life: what would it look like to stop conforming and start surrendering?
Lord, make us brave enough to be ragamuffins for You. Loosen our grip on the things that do not matter. Remind us that holiness is not a performance but a surrender. And when the world looks at us sideways, let us remember that You have always shown up on the fringes, among the barefoot and the broken, with more grace than we deserve and more love than we can hold. In Jesus’ name, Amen.