Categories: uncategorized
Date: 02 May 2006 13:27:18
All sorts of mixed.
Had worked on the Ready 4 Action social action weekend all over the bank holiday and was writing that up for the Wey newspaper, of which I'll say more later but not now (both the Wey and the R4A weekend).
Anyway, jumped (when I say jumped think of that as the slow and uncoordinated movement of someone who had been chopping down and raking up 400 sqaure foot of ten foot brambles for three days) online to check emails, life being full at the moment with a journalism course and a weekend of exhibitions from local students at the art centre coming up soon, and the first I saw was entitled Sad news about Rob and instantly I knew what it was about to say. There were work emails there too, all of which are somewhat urgent, but only one email was opened.
There's so much good I could speak about from the weekend just gone, and I will, because the kids, all 150 of them who joined us as youth group leaders, church leaders and council workers, were amazing, but for now, today, theres only one thing to speak on and to talk about anything else would be flavoured by sadness.
I'm a big fan of the work Rob Lacey produced, both in terms of the idea that summed it up and the manner in which the idea was captured on each and every page of his books: Street bible and Liberator. He wrote a fantastic piece in a recent issue of Artisan which was very inspiring and I'm sure this is just the tip of the iceberg. I met him twice at Spring Harvest a few years ago and was blessed with seeing him perfom the Word on the Street live amongst a large group of friends. He was a high voltage battery of getting a message across, even his hair seemed to sparkle with energy and enthusiasm and he laughed easily and infectiously. We chatted, I thanked him for the Street bible, he thanked me for buying 50 copies :) I drew a caricature of him during a seminar, he signed it, we chatted a little about teens and reading and stuff.
He passed away yesterday at 11am with his wife at his side following a fast detirioration over the weekend. Please keep his wife Sandra and his two children Lukas and Madelena in your thoughts and prayers. All told feel very sad and empty, even though I know that physical death is only half of the story. For Rob and his family and the teams of people he worked with then, thoughts and prayers.