It’s his birthday today. I’ve written this one paragraph sixteen times. Words feel too confining to describe this man who’s finding his shouldering strength in being weak, who has learned to admit fault — fast, who has failed in front of me and though still secretly despises failure counts its frequency as a rite of passage in this life in God, and who is willing to process the aches in his interior life with me and others. We expect them to be, at 24, what only decades of thwarted dreams and jaunts through the valley of the shadow of death can bring them before they’re 44. Nate Hagerty has let his dreams die, let life disappoint him, let his foot faults be made known … such that he is a man who intimately knows the beauty and strength of Jesus through weak skin. By this, he’s one of the strongest men I know. {Happy Birthday, babe.}
