The road from high school to college is often an adventure and nearly always includes unexpected detours. Change is both challenging and necessary to reach the destination and can be difficult for a young believer to accept. Sometimes God upends our carefully laid plans for his own better plans. Charlotte Brady, a first year sports management major from Spring Hill knows this all too well. She has also seen the extravagant grace that results from obedience to God’s leading.
A flag football player, Charlotte was slated to begin her collegiate athletic career elsewhere. One thing athletes tend to have in common is strong time management skills, and Charlotte was no exception. She followed the well trod path that thousands of high school seniors walk each year: get recruited, visit, apply, commit. Her future and team secure, she was ready to coast down that road toward college.
Just weeks before the start of the school year, she received word that the flag football program for which she had been recruited was closing. Charlotte was left to make a big decision in a very short period of time: stay and give up the sport she loves or start over searching for a team with roster space for a late addition. Giving up flag football was out of the question, finding an open spot on a roster would be daunting, finding one with scholarship support behind it, impossible. Scholarship funding and a spot on a nationally ranked flag football team was what God had in mind for Charlotte.
Warner University was a convenient choice for Charlotte, and she admits with humbling transparency that her plan was to begin with Warner and then transfer out. With this in mind, she quietly kept to herself, sticking with classes and practice, not becoming too involved on campus. It didn’t make sense to her to make friends or become involved on campus if she was planning to leave.
God had other plans for Charlotte, and he used the community here at Warner to reach her. From experiencing the power of worship and the word at chapel to reading scripture at the start of every math class with Professor Yates, Charlotte was being drawn out of herself and into a community where she could learn about the God who loved her so much. Self-conscious that she was somehow behind because she did not grow up learning about Jesus, she quickly realized that God’s timing is perfect and there is no such thing as being too behind or too late in knowing him. Charlotte went all-in, saying:
“I prayed for at least one friend in college and he gave me a community; I prayed for the ability to continue playing flag football and he gave me a team with friendships and growth; I prayed for God to show me a sign to make me better and he gave me Warner University.”
In hindsight, she sees clearly the hand of God at work in her life. He changed her path on purpose and opened her to a community where she could grow in all areas. What she thought was a detour was her destination. Instead of leaving Warner, Charlotte is leaving a legacy as one who was given a great gift to know Jesus and is taking advantage of it.
