Trusting the Waymaker: God's Path in Our Lives

[ Applause ]
Amanda Guthrie: >> Good morning.
My name is Amanda and I serve as your library director here on campus.
Some of you may have had me in class.
Some of you are my regulars in the library.
Thank you.
And for those of you who have not been in the library, grab your laptop and come by.
Our whole purpose is to help you along your college path.
Speaking of paths, you probably have somewhat of a path planned out for yourself, right?
For the foreseeable future at least.
Get through college, get started on your career path, maybe down the road,
meet someone, married, have a family.
You have plans.
But are they God's plans?
Are you letting him have his path in your life?
We sing a song about God being our way maker.
Have you seen that in your life?
And is it quiet and subtle most of the time?
Or is it a, hey, do this?
I've had many times that the Lord has adjusted my path.
It's usually subtle.
It's usually like, oh, yeah.
Or this opportunity comes up.
Or, hey, I think I should try that.
But there have been two distinct times in my life when it was the Holy Spirit going, hey, do this.
You kind of can't avoid those.
And if I'm honest, I wish I could say, oh, I'm like Samuel and I say, speak, Lord, I'm listening.
I tend to be more like Moses and go, are you sure you're talking to me?
The first time this happened to me, I was in church.
It was my first home church after I got out of college.
I started working.
I found this church.
I prayed.
Where am I supposed to go?
I believed he led me to it.
And shortly after I started going there, they had an altar call.
They needed someone to volunteer to be the Sunday school teacher.
And we were a tiny church.
So that meant there was only about 10 students.
But that was all different age ranges.
And I would have been teaching all 10.
At that point in my life, that was terrifying.
I was gripping the pew in front of me.
I did not want to go down.
But I did.
And God made something very good out of it.
All right.
The second time that it was, hey, do this, led me to LCU.
But I'm going to back up and talk about in between those times.
So got out of college, started a job, ended up changing to a different position
on the campus that I was at, worked in the library, found out that I loved libraries,
which I kind of already knew, but that I really liked working with you guys.
Students were my passion.
That was my calling.
That's where God had put me.
And so rather than going into engineering, which was what I thought I was going to do,
God led me into libraries.
That was great.
That was where I was meant to be.
After that, okay, met my husband, got married, bought a house, had our first baby.
We thought we were going to stay in our hometown.
We were the oldest kids.
We were going to raise our kids, do our job, take care of our parents as they got older.
That was our plan.
And then one night when I was seven months pregnant with our second child, my husband came
to me and said, I've been offered a job in Lubbock.
That was not the plan.
I had lived in New Mexico in that one spot my whole life.
I thought I was going to stay there.
That wasn't the plan.
Let's see if it will let me do the next one.
Okay, we may not have slides today.
All right, that's fine.
So we talked about it.
We prayed about it.
There we go.
And we ended up moving to Lubbock.
It wasn't easy.
We had a toddler and a six-week-old when we first moved here.
But we made it happen.
God was with us through it all.
So I took care of our little ones and I worked from home
so that my husband could get settled into his new job.
He actually did work for an engineering company as IT.
And so I'm going along.
A little after a year when we moved there, I was cooking supper, normal Tuesday night.
And almost as clearly as if someone was standing next to me, I heard, "Hey,
go look at the LCU website at the jobs."
And again, it was, "Me?
Are you sure you're talking to me?
I'm good.
I'm working at home.
I'm taking care of the kids.
I've got to finish dinner."
No, it was, "Go look.
You need to go look right now."
Do you know what the only job on the website at that time was?
The library.
And what had he already put in place for me?
A library degree.
I said, "Okay, God, if this is what you want, you're going to have to make it easy
because I don't know that this is what I'm supposed to do."
But he did.
It went smoothly.
We found childcare for my children.
The interviews went easily.
And I started in January of 2020.
Yeah, you all remember what happened a few months later.
But for us, it was a double hit because shortly after the lockdown,
my husband received a stage four sinus cancer diagnosis.
That was not the plan.
He was 38.
But we said, "Okay."
And we kept moving forward.
God did what he always does.
He took care of us.
He found doctors for us.
We got the best of care.
We had support all around us.
And by Christmas of that year, my husband was doing better than he'd been in a long time.
And then six months later, he went to his heavenly home.
That was not the plan.
I show this picture.
Oh, that one's already moved.
The last picture of my husband.
It was because at the time we didn't realize it.
He was having horrible headaches.
But it was one of our last family pictures.
And later I got to see how much his face had changed.
But I also got to see the joy that God had put in him,
even though he was moving closer to home.
That wasn't the plan.
But you know what?
It didn't matter that it wasn't the plan.
God knew our full story.
We could only see a portion.
I'll never know why my husband died so young.
But you know what?
I still hold hope.
We are so blessed that we know one day the kids and I will get to see their dad again.
I'm sorry.
I thought I could do this.
I'm thankful for that hope and the peace that comes with it.
In the meantime, though, life can be really hard.
And yet God still makes a path for us.
He is our waymaker, despite it all.
So look back with me.
Even before I even met my husband, God knew what was going to happen.
Why it happened, we don't know.
But he knew what was going to happen.
He put me on the path for a degree.
He gave my husband the job opportunity.
He brought us to Lubbock.
He took care of us.
And he brought me here to this campus that has taken such good care of us.
This is my LCU family, and I'm thankful.
Some of you may be walking a tough path, or you may have already walked a tough path.
But you can always trust him.
You may wonder why you're walking this, and it's okay to wonder.
But continue to give it to him.
I encourage you to take a step back and look at your life and see all the ways
that he's made a path for you that you didn't even expect.
And once you see what our waymaker can do, I encourage you to give your plans
to him and see what he will do for you.
All right.
Be blessed.
Have a great day.
You are dismissed.
Thank you.
: [ Applause ]