The Millionaire Who Lived on a Reservation

Rich Mullins wrote Awesome God, one of the best-selling worship songs of the 1990s. His royalties could have afforded him a very comfortable life. Instead, Mullins asked his financial manager to pay him the average salary of a working-class American — roughly twenty-four thousand dollars a year. Everything else went to charity. He moved to a small trailer on a Navajo reservation in Arizona, teaching music to children who had very little.

Friends said he could have had a mansion. He chose a single-wide trailer. He could have headlined arena tours. Instead, he sat cross-legged on the floor with kids learning to play the recorder.

When Mullins died in a car accident in 1997 at age forty-one, he owned almost nothing. But the children he taught, the ministries he funded, and the songs he left behind tell a different kind of wealth story.

Jesus said, "Whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for My sake will find it" (Matthew 16:25). Rich Mullins took those words literally. He sacrificed comfort, status, and wealth — not because he had to, but because he believed the Kingdom of God was worth more than anything Nashville could offer.

Sacrifice is not always dramatic. Sometimes it looks like a man with a guitar, sitting on a reservation floor, giving everything away.