Part of being a Westmont student is chapel. Three days a week: a speaker, worship, and whatever finds its way onto a random Monday morning. This past week a man named Alvaro Daniel Cagüeñas Hernandez came to speak. CEO for the Americas at Prominence Partners, a consulting firm operating across Latin America and the US, Harvard Business School, fifteen-plus years across multinationals like Siemens and Terpel. A man who has earned the right to walk into a room and command it.
He gave a great talk on leadership. Good enough that I went to his optional follow-up session in Kirkwood Hall after. And good enough that by the end of it, all I could think about was getting ten minutes alone with him.
So I asked. He said yes hurriedly, already being pulled toward another engagement. My class had been canceled that day, which meant I had nothing to lose. I sat down in the lobby of Kirkwood and waited.
Thirty minutes later I got my ten minutes.
I came in with questions about business, leadership, what it actually takes to build something. The kind of questions you ask a man with that résumé when you finally get him alone. And the answers were not what I expected.
Every question I asked came back through the lens of God.
“Building a company is a process that depends on your personal process. God gives what you’re ready for. It all depends on your level.”
“Some things you will not get, and in perspective you will realize they were not good for you.”
“God will do it for you when you’re ready. You must simply ask and be obedient such that you may be ready for when he gives it to you.”
I kept asking. He kept answering the same way. He was starting to sound like a broken record.
Then he picked up a pen and drew two dots on a piece of paper with a straight line connecting them. Then, between the same two dots, he drew a squiggly line, looping back over itself, taking the longest possible way between the same two points.
He told me the story of Israel in the desert.
After being freed from Egypt, the Israelites were headed to Canaan. The journey by the direct route should have taken eleven days — Deuteronomy 1:2 says so plainly. It took them forty years. Not because the distance changed. Because they didn’t.
The straight line is God’s path. One you will not regret. The squiggly line is the path of your own choosing, the one that loops back on itself, that wastes time you didn’t know you were wasting until you’ve spent it. Israel in the desert.
Success, he was telling me, is not a complexity problem. It is an alignment problem. Align yourself with God’s will and you follow the straight line. Remove him and you’re forty years into an eleven-day walk.
Then I asked the question that came to mind.
“Do you regret not going on the other path? The one of your own choice?”
He paused. He looked at me the way you look at someone younger who is trying to lecture you on something you’ve spent a lifetime learning. Not condescending. Just settled. The kind of confidence that doesn’t need to announce itself.
Then he said: “All my mistakes in life came from removing God from the decision. Trust in Jesus. He is your guide.”
And then he was gone, pulled away to another meeting.
I have heard that sentence before. Everyone who grew up in the church has. But I had never heard it said with that kind of weight behind it. The weight of someone who learned it the hard way, across fifteen years and three continents and more decisions than I can count. Not a platitude. A conclusion drawn from a life of evidence.
Trust in Jesus. He is your guide.