DAVID ADAMS speaks to singer-songwriter Emma Mullings about the inspiration behind her debut single, Skinny Roads, and the ongoing journey God is leading her on…
When Sydney’s Emma Mullings came to write her debut single, Skinny Roads, it was with a very personal journey in mind.
“The ‘skinny road’ to me, I guess, represents the road less travelled,” she says of the song’s origins. “I think the ‘God-call’ on our life and our destiny and our purpose is to really follow what is a skinny, bumpy road. You might look over to your right and there’s the wide, easy ride and you think, ‘Hang on a second, what am I doing here?’…It might not look like what you’ve imagined, but you’ve just got to follow the skinny road.”
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“The ‘skinny road’ to me, I guess, represents the road less travelled. I think the ‘God-call’ on our life and our destiny and our purpose is to really follow what is a skinny, bumpy road. You might look over to your right and there’s the wide, easy ride and you think, ‘Hang on a second, what am I doing here?’…It might not look like what you’ve imagined, but you’ve just got to follow the skinny road.” – Emma Mullings, speaking about the inspiration for her debut single, Skinny Road |
While she says the road will be different for each person, the 34-year-old had a very particular ‘road’ in mind when it comes to her own journey: the call for herself and her husband Terrence to relocate their young family, including six-year-old Hosannah and five-year-old Jeremiah, to Miami next year and plant a church there under the banner of the C3 Church (City campus) of which they are members in Sydney.
“It’s been on my husband’s heart for many, many years,” Ms Mullings explains. “(But) I just said to him at the beginning of last year, ‘This isn’t going away and, I need to have God speak to me directly about this’.
“And at the beginning of last year we went over to Miami…and God spoke to me loud and clear about it… I think He’s made it (so) clear now that I feel like if we didn’t go we’d be being disobedient to what He’s called us to do.”
The location is not as a random as it may at first sound. While Mr Mullings, whose parents are Jamaican, was born in Brisbane, he spent a couple of years in Miami as a child.
“He’s just always had Miami on his heart and, you know, Miami’s a very broken city – 97 per cent of people in Miami actually don’t identity with God or church or any religion at all,” Ms Mullings says. “It is one of the highest ‘unchurched’ cities in America. And there’s a lot of need…”
This is partly due to the fact that Miami serves as something of a gateway for what are called “illegal aliens” into the US, Ms Mullings points out, meaning there are thousands of ‘undocumented’ people living there.
“So there’s a lot of people, I think, that feel like they are lost and they don’t feel like they belong anywhere. But they do and…Jesus has a perfect purpose and a plan for their life.”
Ms Mullings’s own story is an example of God’s redemptive plan for individual lives. While brought up in a Christian home in the Queensland town of Ipswich – both her parents were pastors, her mother died of lower intestinal cancer when she was just four-years-old with only three months between her diagnosis and death. Ms Mullings also had an older sister who had died after being born severely brain damaged and another, younger sister who is also severely brain damaged.
“So there was a lot going on and I didn’t understand it and a lot wasn’t talked about back then. I think today we’re a lot more aware of how people process emotional things and tragic life events, but back then things weren’t talked about a lot and I think that’s just the way society was…” Ms Mullings says.
“There was a whole heap of things that happened around that time that made life quite challenging for me and I ended up leaving church at 14 vowing never to return. I was very angry at God and angry at anyone who would even mention the church; I was very negative, very cynical and I ended up without a church for many, many years.”
It was about the age of 23 – Ms Mullings had moved down to Sydney to study music and ended up working for a radio station – that she found Christ.
Doing promotional work at the station she found herself working alongside Terrence – the man who would one day be her husband – and, after some conversations sparked by him listening to a worship CD, he ended up inviting her to church. Repeatedly.
Some months later in early 2004, when she finally answered his invitation and did turn up to church, an ex-Mafia boss was speaking about how God had transformed his life.
“I had to hear his story because I needed to hear a story that shows the restoring power of Jesus Christ,” Ms Mullings recalls. “I needed to hear his story to understand that God was capable of restoring the huge mess that I’d made of my life…I gave my life to Christ that night and, you know what, that was really the beginning of me living for the first time. It was a process…but I was all in.”
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The new single Skinny Roads hit number one on iTunes Australia’s “inspirational” chart following its release last week. “I am a walking testimony of the restoring power of Jesus Christ…It’s been quite a journey but it’s been amazing and God had definitely come through with the goods.” – Emma Mullings |
All in meant that she decided not to take an opportunity that had come her way to head overseas and felt led instead to go to Bible college.
“It was a pretty wild ride and it took quite a few years – I had some great Christian counseling and, you know, there was a process of healing and change that had to take place, but it was amazing and I can honestly say…12 years later God has 100 per cent restored every single thing,” says Ms Mullings.
“I am a walking testimony of the restoring power of Jesus Christ and, if anything, I reckon God’s given me double for my trouble. It’s been quite a journey but it’s been amazing and God had definitely come through with the goods.”
And it’s certainly been a full life since. Ms Mullings has worked as a TV presenter, done some acting and now hosts the morning show on Sydney radio station 103.2 HOPE FM. She’s also found time to study journalism – and then there’s the new single..
Ms Mullings says while she’s had an on and off again relationship over the years with music – music had been part of her early childhood with her mother, Susie Wilson, releasing six worship albums before she passed away while in more recent years Ms Mullings has served as vocal director at C3 City Church – it was only a few years ago that God told her it was time to sing and write again.
With a busy work and family life, she decided to put aside one night a fortnight to work on it. That resulted in the single and the EP which will be released in August as well as, hopefully, an album after that.
“Honestly, it’s been just a beautiful journey with God and it’s been so, I guess, healing and restoring as well…” she says. “It’s just the perfect example of…you just bring to God what you can because He’s told you to do something, and He’ll work with what you bring Him.”
Ms Mullings is passionate about people “walking in all they were created to be, to be the best version of themselves”.
“And I think that always comes with God being the centre of all that you are…” she says. “He can restore anything and my life is a perfect example of that. I just want to encourage people that God can restore. You might have broken dreams but that dream that God’s put in your heart? He’s put it there because it’s part of your dream and purpose. He hasn’t put it there to frustrate you. God is totally for you and He wants you to have an amazing life.”
