"Without Your Wounds"

In Love's service, only Wounded Soldiers can serve.

Jan 23, 2026

Today I’m 69 years old.

“Happy Birthday to me!” huh?

My 79-year-old big brother Joe just called me right after I had typed what I just did and sang me the “Happy Birthday!” song early in the morning before anyone else like our late mother always did for each one of her children. Joe has had a hell of year and especially this last month beginning when he fell in the parking lot of his church on his way to Midnight Mass where he was supposed to give the reading. My big brother fell because his tired old legs just gave out from under him. He’s been convalescing the last month first in a hospital, then in a rehab, and now back in his little apartment for senior citizens on fixed incomes. After Joe sang to me, he started to tell me how cold it is up there in Michigan where he lives now by his choice having moved from sunny Arizona so that he can live near his son and daughter-in-law and granddaughter and grandson, the lights of his life, and I told him, “Quit yer bitchin’!” We both laughed.

Before he died, the old, long-time alcoholic, defrocked Franciscan priest and author of “The Ragamuffin Gospel,” Brennan Manning, said this about his friend Rich Mullins who had died in a car crash some years before at the relatively young age of forty-one.

Rich Mullins was a sensitive and also tortured soul, an exquisite poet, whose own life was healed during his friendship with Brennan Manning, in honor of which, Mullins would later name his fellow musicians, “The Ragamuffin Band.” I’ve written a lot about Rich Mullins, whose poetry and music and life as a follower of Jesus Christ I only came to appreciate after Mullins had died.

I use a lot of Mullins’ music in my posts on three different blogs that I have. And I can say that Mullins’ and Manning’s lives have touched my own with their wounds and have helped me as I try my best to serve others. I guess that’s one thing, if not the main thing, that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is all about.

I have a dentist appointment to get to in thirty minutes to try and save my teeth which I’m starting to lose at great discomfort and expense. I have off work today for my birthday which we will celebrate at lunch with my co-workers, some friends, our son, and my beautiful bride of so many sweet years, and then again on Sunday for our whole family. But I want to get this out right now before I head to the dentist because my big brother is waiting to read it just like he has read every single one of my posts over three different blogs for the last three and half years since I began this writing obsession . . . or it began me, whichever is the better way to say it.

I’ve learned a lot in sixty-nine years, but most of what I’ve learned can be summed up in a song that Rich Mullins once wrote with a friend of his for his friend’s newborn baby boy named Aidan. The title of the song about says it all, “Let Mercy Lead.”

Aidan you’re young
But Aidan you’re growing fast
Me and your mom
And all the love we have
We can only take you so far
As far as we can
But you’ll need something more to guide your heart
As you grow into a man

Let mercy lead
Let love be the strength in your legs
And in every footprint that you leave
There’ll be a drop of grace
If we can reach
Beyond the wisdom of this age
Into the foolishness of God
That foolishness will save
Those who believe
Although their foolish hearts may break
They will find peace
And I’ll meet you in that place
Where mercy leads

Aidan the day
Aidan the day will come
You’ll run the race
That takes us way beyond
All our trials and all our failures
And all the good we dream of
But you can’t see yet where it is you’re heading
But one day you’ll see the face of love

Majik’s Substack

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