By Christie Goode

Over the past two weeks, A Rocha staff have been grieving. We’ve been held, swaying in the tension between grief and gratitude, sorrow and goodness.

On the evening of Wednesday April 6, after a three-year journey with liver cancer, Rob Des Cotes passed away, passed through, to be with our Father in heaven.

Rob has been part of the A Rocha journey in Canada from the very start. Back in the early 2000s when founders Markku and Leah Kostamo were getting A Rocha Canada off the ground, they attended Capilano Community Church, where Rob was a pastor. Soon after, his wife Ruth joined A Rocha as our environmental educator. Later, he and Ruth hosted the first prayer meeting about whether to launch A Rocha’s first environmental centre. And through the years Rob was a regular confidante and encourager, regularly phoning Markku, just to see how things were going.

In 2012, Rob and Ruth moved to the Brooksdale Environmental Centre in South Surrey. Since then he has been a peaceful, attentive, listening presence. Morning prayers, music nights, worship services and daily rhythms at Brooksdale have all been better, because of Rob’s participation.

So on the morning of Thursday April 7, as privileged newcomer, I sat with about 30 of my A Rocha colleagues in the Brooksdale guesthouse. We spent hours, telling each other how we felt. Tears, openly streaming down all of our faces, for hours, as we shared stories of what Rob meant to us.

Henri Nouwen once wrote that resurrection begins in the grief of those who love the deceased. Certainly something powerful and deeply good was released in each of us that Thursday morning. Something about Rob’s being, his character, his Way of Life, his way of seeking the Father’s voice – somehow it was amplified in our grief. We felt it all more strongly than if he had preached it to us himself. Our grieving, our sadness, revealed Rob’s impact on us, like a spotlight, pointing to all the good things he had sowed in us through years of conversations, years of co-journeying.

Rob had a special ministry to us, and to thousands, really, who knew him through church circles, Regent circles, or Imago Dei. He recognized that we – all of us – are persons made in the image of God, for a merged life with God. For decades, he opened his life for God to use him to pray and teach and preach that message.

Henri Nouwen has a wonderful line that goes like this: “You and I would dance for joy were we to know truly that we become the bread that will multiply itself in the giving. You and I would no longer fear death, but would live toward it as the culmination of our desire to make all of ourselves a gift to others.”

I don’t know if Rob ever read these lines of Nouwen’s, but I saw their truth become flesh among us this week. Rob’s life has been bread to us, and it is being multiplied now that it is fully and completely given. I have seen that every time we cry, every time we fondly tell a story, every time we comment on our gratitude for Rob’s presence in our life – his nourishment is released yet again.

Thank you, Rob, for your deep, deep impact on the culture of A Rocha in its first fourteen years of life. Your gifts and prayers are now baked into our DNA. We pray that what you have given to us will be released again and again in the years to come, to nourish others, as we remember you.