#57: Rich Mullins: The Shoeless Saint

#57: Rich Mullins: The Shoeless Saint

Note: The Love Thy Neighborhood podcast is made for the ear, and not the eye. We would encourage you to listen to the audio for the full emotional emphasis of this episode. The following transcription may contain errors. Please refer to the audio before quoting any content from this episode. 

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JESSE EUBANKS: In the summer of 1997, I was 18 years old and about to be a senior in high school, and my values as a person were being turned upside down. They were changing dramatically, and in particular they were changing in three ways. The first one is that I suddenly had come to realize God’s concern for the poor. I had somebody teach me about the 2000 passages of Scripture about God’s concern for the poor. I was also in a place where I really just wanted to drop the persona of what a “good Christian” looked like and just have more emotional realness in my life, the ability to show up and just to be honest about things – honest about who I was, what I was struggling with – and have other people do the same thing. I was also in a tough place even in my relationship with my family. I had just gone through a really difficult season with my own dad where he had cut me out of his life, so I had this huge father wound going on that desperately needed to be filled with God’s love. And I began to look around and just wonder, “Is anyone else struggling with these things – questions about poverty, questions about emotional realness, about father wounds, about God’s love?” But then that summer, I went and saw a guy in concert named Rich Mullins. And as I listened to Rich’s songs and as I listened to him talk between those songs – often at length – I found somebody that embodied those values, somebody who really did seem like he was trying his best to walk with Jesus in ways that seemed so counter-cultural and upside down and strange and rebellious and fascinating. He sort of had this aroma of Jesus about him, and ever since then, to this day, I continue to be inspired and haunted by the story of Rich Mullins. It’s a strange story full of twists and drama and beauty and heartbreak, and so today, producer Rachel Szabo, she is going to share with you the story of a ragamuffin musician named Rich Mullins.

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JESSE EUBANKS: You’re listening to the Love Thy Neighborhood podcast. Today’s episode – “Rich Mullins: The Shoeless Saint.” Welcome to our corner of the urban universe.

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RACHEL SZABO: Young Debbie Mullins sat at the piano in the living room. She had been tasked by her piano teacher to practice the hymn “Abide With Me,” but there was this one stubborn spot she couldn’t seem to get right, no matter how many times she played it. So an exasperated Debbie got up to take a break, and her mom, who was in the kitchen, heard the piano keys fall silent – but just for a moment. Soon, the notes to “Abide With Me” once again floated into the kitchen and into the ears of Mrs. Mullins. And when it came to that stubborn spot, that spot Debbie had gotten wrong over and over again – this time it was played beautifully and perfectly. Mrs. Mullins left her work in the kitchen and rushed into the living room. “Oh, Debbie,” she said, “You’re really getting it.” But when she made it into the room, she was in for a surprise. It wasn’t Debbie at the piano. Instead, it was her younger brother, Richard Wayne. He’d been watching Debbie practice, and just by watching he knew exactly how to play the song, even the tricky parts. He was just five years old at the time. Clearly, Richard Wayne Mullins, or Rich as most people know him, had a gift for music. It would be an understatement to say that Rich loved music. He seemed to breathe it. Later in his career, he was known to write songs – good songs, catchy songs, songs infused with soul-piercing truth – in just five minutes. But that’s getting ahead of the story.

Richard Wayne Mullins was born on October 21, 1955 in Richmond, Indiana. It was a land that was known for two things – farming and basketball. And since Rich was good at neither, he had trouble fitting in as a kid. Many of us know what that’s like, but for Rich – who felt everything very deeply – being an outsider was particularly painful.

RICH MULLINS: I’m not an athlete, but my experience as a kid was I was made fun of so, so much that what I did then was I, I wouldn’t participate and I think I cheated myself out of a lot of fun.

RACHEL SZABO: Adding to that pain was the fact that his dad was more than a little disappointed that his son was neither a farmer nor a jock. He was a musician of all things – a musician. Mr. Mullins didn’t really understand music, so he and Rich never really connected. Rich would carry that disconnect with him for a long time, but his parents were good parents. They wanted the best for all their kids. So in elementary school, Rich was enrolled in piano lessons. In fourth grade, he was asked to play at church during the communion meditation, his first public performance. He practiced and practiced, which really he didn’t need to. He could play most things as easily as blinking. And after that Sunday, his piano teacher asked him how it went. He told her, “It went great. Everyone liked it, thought I did a good job.” His piano teacher was not happy. She told him, “When you play at church, you’re directing people’s attention to God, not to how well you play.” Rich took that lesson to heart and from then on saw music as more of a ministry than a performance.

Perhaps the only thing that fascinated Rich more than music was God. Rich started following God at a young age. His mother grew up Quaker. From her, he learned the importance of silence and reverence. And his father grew up Protestant. From him, he learned the importance of Bible reading and honesty. Rich was always talking about Jesus. He was fascinated by the man who was also God who was also our Savior who was also our friend. Maybe that’s why whenever anyone asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, he always said he wanted to be a missionary.

Following that dream, Rich attended Cincinnati Bible College in Ohio. Now most of us when we go to college, we learn for perhaps the first time what it is to live just on the edge of feeling poor, living on ramen cooked in our dorm room microwaves or the dollar menu at McDonald’s. But as with everything he did in life, Rich took the poor college kid experience to another level. In the evenings, he would go to a local pizzeria. He would order only a Coke, and he would sit there sipping on his Coke, waiting. And when the families and other tables around him were done eating and got up to leave, Rich would make his rounds, eating all the leftover, half-eaten slices and remnants of crust. When asked why he did this, Rich always said that identifying with the poor helped him be closer to Jesus. Surprisingly, the restaurant never kicked him out for it. In college, he played music and lived with a group of close friends. They called themselves “Zion.” 

RICH MULLINS: I suppose you know all of us. That’s Beth that just sang that, and Tom sang the first song. My name is Rich, and Jenny, who is the only one of us that is still a student here, is, um, going to sing the next song. 

RACHEL SZABO: He remained friends with the members of Zion for the rest of his life. Rich thought people were an important part of living, that through people the gospel gets lived out. Rich wrote, “I’m a Christian, not because someone explained the nuts and bolts of Christianity to me, but because there were people who were willing to be nuts and bolts.” Because of that, Rich was always surrounding himself with people – and not just with other musicians. He hung out with the awkward kid in class who also felt like an outsider or with the random hitchhiker on the side of the road. Jesus kept company with all kinds of people, and so did Rich Mullins.

So this group of friends – Zion – they played music all over the area, traveling to Northern Kentucky, other parts of Ohio. They became a local sensation, and fans begged them for an album. So Rich and the members of Zion recorded one called Behold The Man. 

AUDIO CLIP: You can’t live without him… For unto us… Giving me hope to carry on…

RACHEL SZABO: All the songs were written by Rich, and one of them would become perhaps his most popular song of his whole career – the song, “Sing Your Praise to the Lord.” 

AUDIO CLIP: Praise to the Lord… 

RACHEL SZABO: Even people who have never heard of Rich Mullins have heard this song played in their church. And at the time they made the album, someone else heard it as well.

It was Labor Day weekend, and Rich’s friend Beth, one of the Zion members, went down to Nashville. She had an appointment with a guy from a record label. She wanted to talk to him and ask about what opportunities there were to maybe expand the reach of Zion’s music. And of course, she had with her a cassette tape of their album Behold The Man, but the meeting ended up not being about Zion at all. It ended up being about Rich. Beth just couldn’t stop talking about him, how talented he was, how poignant his lyrics were, and how much God had gifted him and how his music was unlike anything anyone else did. Well, the meeting ended, the record label guy said thanks, took the cassette tape, and that was that – until the label brought another artist into the room who was looking for songs for a new album and the guy put in the tape from Zion. The first song played – “Sing Your Praise to the Lord” – and this artist thought it was the best song she had heard in a while and she said could her label please contact whoever this Rich Mullins guy was and get the rights for her to cover this song on her next album? Yes, they could. That artist was Amy Grant. 

AUDIO CLIP: Sing your praise to the Lord… 

RACHEL SZABO: And that song she covered climbed to the top of the charts, which put the name Rich Mullens in the ears of the big Christian music execs, which led to Rich signing with a record label, which led to him recording his first official album as a big time musician. And that first album – well, it bombed actually, big time. Rich didn’t understand. He had followed all the steps to having a successful music career. Why had it not worked? Well, Rich ended up not having much time to navel gaze about his own success or lack thereof because shortly after a friend of his attempted suicide, shot himself in the stomach. And when people are feeling hopeless and despairing, we can often feel that way ourselves, wanting to help but not knowing what to do – feeling hopeless. So Rich did the only thing he knew to do – make music. He wrote a song dedicated to his friend. He called it “Verge of a Miracle.” Part of the lyrics say this – “Voices are loud, but seldom clear. But beneath the confusion that’s running so deep, there’s a promise you must hear. The love that seems so far away is standing very near.” The friend ended up surviving, and the song – which was originally a personal song for his friend – became a number one hit.

AUDIO CLIP: You’re on the verge of a miracle…

RACHEL SZABO: And Rich remembered that lesson his piano teacher had taught him all those years ago – that music wasn’t about his success. It was about helping people see God. “Verge of a Miracle” appeared on his second album, and by his third album, his song, “Awesome God” – 

AUDIO CLIP: Awesome God he reigns…

RACHEL SZABO: – became a Christian radio sensation, making Rich Mullins a Christian household name. But now that he was a part of the contemporary Christian music scene, there was one unspoken rule if you wanted to be a Christian artist, a true Christian artist – and that was you moved to Nashville, the mecca of Christian music. And so Rich never actually finished college. He dropped out with six years of unfinished studies under his belt, and he moved to Nashville. But as much as he hadn’t fit into his farming and basketball hometown as a kid, he doubly did not fit in with the Christian music scene. For one, he just didn’t look like a big name recording artist. They wore trendy clothes, had clean cut hairstyles. They looked presentable. Rich’s signature look was an old T-shirt, patterned jeans, and bare feet. He actually rarely wore shoes because he was constantly giving them away to kids in poverty or to the homeless guy on the street. He also liked to keep his hair shoulder length, and it often looked like it hadn’t been washed in a week. One time he was touring with what was up to that point the largest Christian music tour in history, and musicians are often provided what’s called a “green room.” It’s a separate space where the performers can have snacks, hang out before the show. On the first stop of the tour, Rich came into the green room in his shabby, worn out clothes, looking like he hadn’t shaved or even showered for days. One of the managers saw him, and she asked him to leave. She didn’t realize who he was. She thought he must be a roadie or one of the trailer drivers. Rich didn’t object to the request. He just stood out in the hallway until the show started. And I would’ve loved to see the look on that manager’s face when later he walked up on stage and all the teenagers started screaming, but this sort of thing happened often. On more than one occasion, Rich was asked to leave a venue because he was mistaken for a homeless bum. He also didn’t fit in because Rich was pretty critical of the Christian music industry itself. He didn’t understand making thousands of dollars off of commercializing Christianity or why listeners elevated artists to some level of spiritual authority. In many of his concerts, he used his platform to critique the views people had of Christian music.

RICH MULLINS: I’ve been in Christian music for I don’t know how long. I grew up in the church, you know, which is, it’s hard to be in the church and not be involved in Christian music. In fact, I think the best Christian music is the music of the church. I think that’s what Christian music is really about. And the rest of it, you know, it’s, it’s so funny being a Christian musician because it always scares me when I talk to you guys and you guys think so highly of Christian music, contemporary Christian music especially, because I kind of go, “Man, I know a lot of us, and we don’t know jack about anything.” (laughter) Not that I don’t want you to buy our records. (laughter) Or come to our concerts. I sure do. But you should come for entertainment. If you really want spiritual nourishment, you should go to church.

RACHEL SZABO: One time some of his managers asked him to lose a few pounds and learn a few dance moves, just to make himself a bit more trendy and successful, especially since the teenagers seemed to like him. Rich, of course, flat out told them no. Wherever he went, Rich Mullins never seemed to play by the rules. And of course we hear this and might think, “Yes, how cool. He’s bucking the system,” but never fitting in isn’t all glamorous rebellion. Rich often felt lonely, and he often wondered if he was loved. A lot of that came back to his strained relationship with his dad. Even after becoming a chart-topping musician, his dad would still ask him, “Yeah, but when are you gonna get a career?” Mr. Mullins just never understood the world Rich inhabited, and he was not good at showing affection to any of his kids. And I once heard a wise person say, “The way you relate is the way you relate.” So the way Rich related to his dad – wondering if he was loved, if he was valued, why he wasn’t good enough – was sometimes the way Rich related to his heavenly dad, to God. Was God disappointed in him? What did God really think of him really? Existential questions that we all face at some time or another. Rich faced these haunting questions throughout his twenties and into his thirties, and as much as he prayed, read his Bible, wrote songs, he never seemed to be truly satisfied with an answer.

JESSE EUBANKS: Rich would finally get an answer to his gnawing questions, and he would get those answers from a cassette tape. We’ll be right back.

COMMERCIAL

JESSE EUBANKS: It’s the Love Thy Neighborhood podcast. I’m Jesse Eubanks. Today’s episode – “Rich Mullins: The Shoeless Saint.” Producer Rachel Szabo has been telling the story of Rich Mullins, who finds himself wondering something that we all wonder – am I loved, am I valuable? And he’s about to have those questions finally answered. That’s where we’ll pick up.

RACHEL SZABO: One day, Rich was driving his Jeep, probably on his way to a gig. That’s usually where he was going – to play music somewhere. His best friend Beaker was in the passenger seat, and Beaker put a cassette tape into the deck and pressed play. It was a sermon. Rich rolled his eyes. He never cared for preaching. He found it usually full of fluff and feel-good-about-yourself isms. But about halfway through the tape, Rich pulled the Jeep off to the side of the road and stopped. When his friend Beaker asked him what was wrong, he noticed Rich’s eyes were so full of tears that he couldn’t see to drive. The tape was of a preacher named Brennan Manning, and the sermon was all about the good news of the indescribable, unstoppable, almost insane love of God.

BRENNAN MANNING SERMON CLIP: Our religion never begins with what we do for God. It always starts with what God does for us, the great, wondrous things that God dreamed up and achieved for us in Christ Jesus. This morning, when the Lord comes streaming into your life in the power of his word and the fellowship of his faith community, all he asks is that you’ll be astonished that he bothered to come to you at all. The next time you look at a cross and learn at what price you are loved, all God asks is that you marvel, be surprised, let your mouth hang open, and begin to breathe deeply.

RACHEL SZABO: It hit Rich to his core. He had heard the gospel of God’s love all his life. He had built his whole life and his career around the gospel, but he had never heard anyone explain God’s love the way this man did, that there was nothing you could do to make God love you more and nothing you could do to make him love you less. He loved you completely, period, full stop. And Rich realized all the affirmation and acceptance and belonging he had longed for – it had always been there in Christ. He just needed someone to remind him. From then on, all his tours focused on one theme, the love of God. Rich figured if he, a successful musician who wrote songs about God every day, had needed reminding of God’s love for him, surely everyone else in the world needed reminding of it too. 

RICH MULLINS: And I think, you know, the thing everybody really wants to know anyway is, is not, you know, what the, uh, theory of relativity is, but I think what we all really wanna know anyway is whether we’re loved or not. And that’s, that’s why I, I like, you know, the Scriptures because you get the feeling from reading them that, uh, we might be.

RACHEL SZABO: Only when we know that we are loved by God are we free to love other people, and that’s exactly what Rich did. At age 34, he left Nashville and moved to Wichita, Kansas to attend Friends University. His new dream was to become a music teacher. He wanted to teach music to children who lived on Native American reservations, children who lived in poverty and probably wondered if there was a God who loved them. Through music, Rich wanted to go to those children on those reservations and tell them yes there was, but to do that he needed a teaching degree. And while Rich was once again hitting the books, he was still making albums and touring. He was still a well-known and successful musician, but he never wanted to feel like he was above anyone else. So he signed up to play French horn in the pep band, an instrument he wasn’t particularly skilled at. One day he would be in Ireland shooting a music video for his new album. The next day he was a man in his mid-thirties playing French horn at the college football game. It was a strange contrast, but then again, Rich Mullens never did anything the way it was expected. Not when it came to fame and not when it came to money either, because this time in college he wasn’t a poor young adult eating scraps at a pizzeria. All those songs and albums and tours and music videos put a pretty penny to Rich’s name. And most of us would buy a nice house – maybe something with a swimming pool – or buy a new car – maybe with leather seats – or travel the world, but Rich knew exactly what to do with his money. It was an idea he had gotten from his uncle years ago.

Rich writes, “Before I got into this music business, I was determined to live a life of dire and grinding poverty. I remember my uncle saying, ‘Wow, you are so proud of being poor. What’s so great? You would do a lot better to be a little more industrious, a little more frugal. If you’re really concerned about the poor, becoming poor isn’t going to help them. It’s just going to ease your own conscience. If you’re really concerned about the poor, go out and make a fortune and spend it on them.'” And now Rich had a fortune, so he hired an accountant to handle all of his money with these instructions – that Rich only wanted to receive whatever the average working person’s wage was. At the time, it was around 24,000 a year. Rich lived only on that, on the average American wage. No other money ever crossed his path. The rest was all given away to charities or even to random strangers who were in a bind.

Also while in Wichita for round two of college, he formed another close group of friends, five guys who called themselves the “Kid Brothers of St. Frank.” Frank is the name Rich liked to call Saint Francis of Assisi. The friends would do their best to hold to the three virtues Saint Francis upheld – poverty, obedience, and chastity. Rich had poverty down pretty good. He usually needed some accountability when it came to the other two. The Kid Brothers of St. Frank all woke up an hour early every morning to spend time together in Bible reading and prayer. And since he was the oldest, Rich became a sort of mentor to the group, reminding them of the love of God and how that love allows us to love other people. Rich writes, “I think you can profess the Apostles’ Creed until Jesus returns, but if you don’t love somebody, you were never a Christian.” One of the people Rich thought he had never loved well was his dad. By this time his dad had passed away, but if he had still been alive, he might have said the same thing – that he never thought he had loved Rich well. It was a relationship that felt little peace for Rich. It caused him a lot of turmoil and pain. So one weekend he went away on a retreat with Brennan Manning, the preacher from that cassette tape. And Brennan had an idea for Rich – that he should write two letters, one letter from himself to his dad and the other letter imagining if his dad were writing something to him. Well, we all know from all his song lyrics that Rich was skilled with a pen, so it seemed like a pretty easy task. But as Rich sat down to write and as the words flowed, so did the tears. His weeping was so loud that he could be heard clear on the other side of the retreat center. He was weeping over the loss of losing his dad, over the realization that his dad had never been able to love him very well, had never been able to express the deep love of God through the way he treated his son, and now he was gone and would never have the opportunity to do so. And Rich wept over the realization that despite his dad’s shortcomings God did love him perfectly. Here’s part of that letter. Rich imagined his dad writing these words to him.

“I couldn’t imagine that sounds and rhythms and feelings and thoughts could be to you what machinery and calves and corn was to me because I had no time to feel things and a quicker head than heart. I never guessed that those things were valuable, but I valued you. I’m sorry for being the occasion for your pain. I am here in the company of several fathers who occasioned pain in their sons. Abraham did it to Isaac. Noah did it to Ham. David did it to Absalom. God Almighty even did it to his boy Jesus. If you love someone, you’ll surely hurt them. That’s a fact of life. But the pain of love, that passion – it’s the pain of longing, the hunger and thirst for righteousness. You should see how good righteousness looks on me. Your mother will faint. Now I look at it on you and weep for joy. I burst with it. Know that, and know I love you.”

Through that letter, Rich finally made peace with his dad.

Rich graduated college, this time with a music teaching degree, and following his dream he moved to a Native American reservation in New Mexico. Some of his Kid Brothers of St. Frank friends went with him. When he wasn’t touring or making albums, he lived in a trailer home on the reservation. He wanted to live in a hogan, a traditional Navajo house with six to eight sides made out of logs and mud. But he had to build it himself, and since physical labor was never his strong suit, it took a while. And when he wasn’t touring or making albums or working on his hogan, he taught the children on the reservation how to sing. 

AUDIO CLIP

RACHEL SZABO: Those children taught Rich a thing or two as well. He writes, “I don’t think I really understood poverty at all until I met these kids, the poverty of those who go to bed hungry and the poverty of those who sleep with indifference. Wealth can’t be defined in terms of what we have, but only in terms of how free we are to give and take.” Rich had big dreams for life on the reservation. He would go for walks and just imagine the possibilities – ministries and teaching music and sharing the gospel. Rich fell in love with the reservation and the Native Americans who lived there. For Rich, music infused him with life, and he wanted these children to experience that and he wanted them to experience the love of God, the kind of love that makes you cry so much you can’t see. Perhaps that’s why it came as a shock when one day he told a friend about all his ideas from ministry on the reservation, but that he wouldn’t be doing any of them, that on one of his many walks he had had a vision in which God had told him that he would fund the work but would not actually do any of it himself. Needless to say, the friend was rather surprised and full of questions – like why? Why wouldn’t Rich do any of it? After all, it was his dream. Why would God tell him something like that?

It happened on a Friday. September 19, 1997. Rich was driving his Jeep with his friend Mitch, one of the Kid Brothers of St. Frank. They were headed from Chicago to play a show at a youth rally in Wichita. They left Chicago around nine in the morning, stopped at a gas station to get some coffee. The coffee machine was a typical gas station kind where you hold the button down and the coffee comes out – except when Rich stopped the button, the coffee did not stop. It overflowed his cup and went all over the floor. They had to get a manager. The manager came over, took one look at them, and asked, “Hey, aren’t you Rich Mullins?” Rich Mullins said, “Yeah, and sorry about the mess.” His friend Mitch said they laughed about that for a good 20 minutes after they got back in the Jeep. The drive was long, 10 and a half hours to get to Wichita. They would be arriving well after dark, and then it started raining, the roads becoming slick with precipitation. And around 10 p.m., the Jeep drifted over into the grass of the median. They made a sharp course correction trying to get back onto the road, but the sudden change in direction caused the Jeep to lose its balance. It flipped and rolled at about 70 miles per hour. Both men were thrown from the vehicle. A car that had been driving behind them saw what happened and pulled over to help. They saw Mitch first. He had suffered a significant head injury but was still alive. When they checked on Rich, he had already died.

His funeral was held just a few days after the accident. After that, two public memorials were held, one in Nashville and one in Wichita, where Rich had gotten his teaching degree. In total, more than 5,000 people came to those services to remember Rich. One person, a friend from his band Zion back at Cincinnati Bible College, said that having her husband see and know Rich had helped him believe God loved him. One of Rich’s current band members said that he frequently recalled one of Rich’s favorite sayings, that there’s nothing you can do to make God love you more and nothing you can do to make him love you less. He recalled that saying often when he was facing difficult times in his life. Another musician who briefly toured with Rich said that her husband came to believe in Jesus just from sitting in the audience night after night listening to Rich talk about the love of God. In all, Rich made nine albums over the course of his career. He had been in the middle of making his 10th, what he simply wanted to call The Jesus Record – 10 songs focused on the life and person of Jesus. After his death, his band went on to record those songs with a handful of other Christian artists. They even brought in the London Symphony Orchestra. They took Rich’s unfinished idea and made it into a great album, polished and flawless. But the album also includes something else. Before Rich died, he made a demo of his Jesus songs in a small country church, hammering on the piano and singing into a tape recorder – one of his last recordings he ever did. It does not sound polished and it’s definitely not flawless, but it captures the style Rich had throughout his life – raw, honest, and simple, not making the performance the centerpiece, but God.

AUDIO CLIP

RACHEL SZABO: And just like God had said, Rich’s vision for the work on the reservation did happen. Family and friends formed a nonprofit called The Legacy of a Kid Brother of St. Frank. This nonprofit teaches music and art to kids living on reservations and tells them the hope of Jesus that Rich sang so much about. Many Christian music artists have said that no one wrote songs like Rich Mullins. The world truly lost a great artist the night that he died, but as the Scriptures tell us, to live is Christ and to die is gain. What we have lost is nothing compared to what Rich has now gained. As one friend put it during Rich’s memorial service, there’s a ragamuffin loose somewhere in heaven walking barefoot on the streets of gold.

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JESSE EUBANKS: If you’ve benefited at all from this podcast, please help us out by leaving a review wherever it is that you listen to podcasts. Your review will help other people discover our show.

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JESSE EUBANKS: Most of the stories in today’s episode are adapted from the book Rich Mullins: An Arrow Pointing to Heaven by James Bryan Smith. This episode was hosted by me, Jesse Eubanks. Rachel Szabo is our producer and narrator for today’s show. Also, originally Rachel came to me and proposed doing a mashup of Rich Mullins and VeggieTales Music.

RACHEL SZABO: Well, it bombed actually, big time. 

JESSE EUBANKS: Anna Tran is our audio engineer. Music for today’s episode comes from Lee Rosevere, Poddington Bear, and Blue Dot Sessions. Theme music and commercial music by Murphy DX. If you, like Rich Mullins, want to extend the love of God to those around you, come serve with Love Thy Neighborhood. We offer discipleship and missions in our modern times for young adults ages 18 to 30. Serve for a summer or a year. Grow in your faith and life skills. Learn more at lovethyneighborhood.org. Which of these was a neighbor to the man in need? The one who showed mercy. Jesus tells us, “Go, and do likewise.”