If I had to pick one song to define Rich Mullins' legacy for me personally, it would be "Hard to Get."

Released posthumously on "The Jesus Album," "Hard to Get" is a song about the struggle of an honest faith to reconcile the assurances of Christ's presence in our weakness with that weakness itself. It asks with steadily increasing anguish whether Christ hears us, if a God who is beyond our understanding can understand our griefs and sorrows. The song sweats blood over these questions so hard that it finally finds its answer in that struggle.

It's an amazing song on an impressive album. And if the writer of an article I just read on Medium is correct, the song may owe its depth to Mullins' struggle to accept himself for who he was.

Mullins, the writer contends, was gay.    

The music of Rich Mullins was fairly inescapable in the late 1980s and early 1990s if you attended an evangelical church.

I just read a fascinating piece on Rich Mullins, that he was largely closeted his whole life, and the ways he wrestled with the notion that God loved him while the church loved only what it wanted to see

And in that painful struggle he understood the gospel at a fundamentally deeper level than you or I ever will

I had never heard nor cared. The Jesus Album was the only record of his I liked. But I read it fascinating article on Medium today

Yeah, I saw/see the appeal. But except for a few songs and that one album, he never did much for me

But that album — esp Hard to Get, and Man of no Reputation— has some of the finest meditation on the gospel I’ve ever found

It’s the raw and pained faith that comes from weakness, the sort of faith that white cishet men often chastise for weakness because we so badly misunderstand what faith and strength really are

It’s why I like and approve the church’s newly adopted approach to Bible study ; ie, how do you feel about this passage? What bothers troubles you about it?