Today was an incredibly sad and painful day at Luther. Timothy Lull, the president of PLTS (our cluster partner and sister seminary in California) died late last evening, of complications from some recent surgery. He had been, by all acounts, doing very well after the surgery, so this was sudden, abrupt, and shocking. His sister Patricia is our dean of students, and she and I had just enjoyed two days together on our faculty retreat. I spent most of the bus ride to the retreat (which was two hours away) talking with her, and she was very upbeat about her brother's health.
I haven't seen her since, but I can hardly imagine her pain and shock. I have only known Dr. Lull for the past three years, but even in that short time he has touched my life in some powerful ways. His death leaves me in tears, and the shock waves have only just begun to spread through our community. Please keep Dr. Lull's family and the ever extending communities outward who have felt his touch, in your prayers.
If you're interested in some of the work he's done, you can find brief excerpts of an address about the "resiliency of Martin Luther" here. You can find his "charge to the graduates" of PLTS this year, here, and his welcome to students, here. You can order some of his books, here, and here.