‘Ragamuffin’ is based on the life of Rich Mullins, a musical prodigy who rose to Christian music fame and fortune only to walk away to live on a Navajo reservation. An artistic genius, raised on a tree farm in Indiana by a callous father, Rich wrestled all of his life with the brokenness and crippling insecurity born of his oppressive childhood. A lover of Jesus and a rebel in the church, Rich refused to let his struggles with his own darkness tear him away from a God he was determined to love. As he struggled with success in Nashville and depression in Wichita, Rich desired most of all to live a life of honest and reckless faith amidst a culture of religion and conformity.
Towards the end of his life he encountered a love deeper than he had ever known, before dying tragically in a car accident at age 41.
He was a prophet and a poet and a beggar, more comfortable with the homeless than the wealthy, more in love with Jesus than religion, more interested in the music than the song. He felt too much, and held too much. He searched desperately his whole life for a way to belong down here, but he never did. He was just passing through.