Sen Lin was born in China on June 23rd, 1972, and spent his childhood living next to a power plant, where his father was the chief engineer.  Sen and Ning met in high school where they started their friendship. They became best friends during the freshman year in Beijing and began dating a year later. 

 

At Tsinghua University, Sen studied electrical engineering.  After graduation, he came to the United States for the graduate study majoring in computer science. Sen and Ning got married in 1995, and Ning joined Sen as fellow graduate students at the University of Connecticut.

 

Having graduated in 1997, Sen landed a job as a control system engineer at ABB in Cleveland, Ohio, where Sen and Ning worked and lived for the next six years. They celebrated the birth of their first child, Edmund, during the Christmas season in 2004.  The family moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan for the next two years, where Sen studied for MBA at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan.

 

Sen worked for JP Morgan in New York City after graduation, and the family welcomed baby Sebastian during another Christmas season, in 2010. It was deemed a tough time to be in the banking industry. Sen decided to explore new opportunities in Asia and joined JP Morgan in Hong Kong. Over time he established himself as an expert of merger and acquisition in the chemical industry.

 

After working and living in Seattle for two years, Ning and the two boys joined Sen in Hong Kong. Sen’s enthusiasm for life masked the emerging signs of a malignant illness. By the time he was diagnosed with lymphoma in April 2016, the cancer was already at its last stage. After six rounds of chemo-therapies with increasing intensity and a grueling surgery to stop a massive intestinal bleeding, the doctors in Hong Kong ran out of options. Sen and Ning went back to Seattle and enrolled in a clinical trial at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.

 

Sen survived three rounds of the risky Car-T therapies, with the last two at the maximum dosage level. While the cancer was still there, it was temporarily contained. The family was united again and settled in Bellevue. During this time, Sen and Ning came to Bethany Presbyterian Church to worship. With the support and influence of a few dear friends, Sen started reading books by C.S. Lewis and Eugene Peterson and studied the Bible in earnest. Sen’s baptism was held at Bethany on November 12th with the support of a loving congregation. Before he passed away on December 1st, he told Ning that he considered the baptism at Bethany one of his three lifetime achievements, with the other two being married to his best friend and being the father of two great children.