A life lived between the Word and the wide country.
Don Mills was born in Princeton, British Columbia, and raised among the redwoods of Eureka, California. In 1992 he made his home with his family in Twin Falls, Idaho — a town of canyon light and open sky that has shaped both his writing and his paintings ever since.
A voice behind many voices.
For twenty years, Don served as the Program and Music Director of CSN International. From that quiet seat behind the microphone he helped bring trusted Bible teachers to the air and championed much of the modern praise and worship music coming from churches around the world.
It was a vocation of attention — listening for what was true, what was singable, and what would carry hope into living rooms and pickup trucks from one coast to the other.
"I have spent my years listening — to teachers, to singers, to the wind on a back pasture. Faith is what gathers them all into a single song."
From a foggy lake in the Redwoods.
Don began painting years ago, learning under the artist George Presson. In those early days he was invited to the home of the well-known painter Morris Graves, who lived beside a lake deep in the Redwoods. Don still recalls the mist on the water that morning — a quiet, mystical place that taught him how much can be said in a single layer of color.
After marriage and the long years of family and work, the brushes were set aside. They have only recently been picked up again. Newly retired, Don has returned to the easel — and to the country of his memory. His latest paintings carry a Horse and Western feel, drawn from his family's cattle-ranching background, blending surrealism with inspirational landscapes and meaningful scenes.
Eighteen years of study — set down at last as Precepts of the Blessed Hope.
The same patience that taught Don to wait for a sunset has shaped his writing. Precepts of the Blessed Hope is a work of careful, reverent reading — eighteen years of returning to Scripture and listening for what endures. It is, like the land he paints, a quiet country to be walked slowly.