Nate, Julia, and passages

One of the bit­ter­sweet things about col­lege min­istry is watch­ing the peo­ple in your min­istry grad­u­ate and move on.

That’s fresh on my mind because I bumped into two stu­dents who recent­ly walked the line.

This week­end Julia Heng (who just got her mas­ter’s degree in Man­age­ment, Sci­ence, and Engi­neer­ing) dropped by for a few min­utes to return some stuff she had bor­rowed from us. I had­n’t seen her since our grad­u­at­ing stu­dents celebration–she’d been galla­vant­i­ng around the coun­try with her par­ents (it was her mom’s first time in Amer­i­ca). Then she head­ed back to Sin­ga­pore.

And then this morn­ing I had break­fast with Nate Flake. Nate just grad­u­at­ed from Stan­ford with a degree in lin­guis­tics. He speaks more lan­guages than any­one else I know.

He was­n’t able to join us for the cel­e­bra­tion that we hold right before grad­u­a­tion, and he’s been on the road since receiv­ing his diplo­ma. This was the first time since then that we’ve been able to con­nect.

And tomor­row he flies to Chi­na for a year. He’s not sure what he’ll do there, he just knows that he does­n’t want to teach Eng­lish. He’s angling for a job as a trans­la­tor or some­thing.

Good luck and God­speed, Julia & Nate! We’ll miss you.