“Be confident in who you are. In who you are created to be. Because the Lord doesn’t need you to be somebody else.”
I sat in Amanda Chenault’s new office, the comfy gray chair I’ve perched in many times before threatening to swallow me. Though the decor is different – new frames on the wall, new inspirational quotes on the shelves – the sense of comfort I received immediately upon walking through the door remained the same. I’ll admit I was a little nervous at first. As a second-year admissions ambassador, I work for Chenault now, and we’ve never chatted one-on-one before. But her ready smile as I entered the room put me at ease.
I came to talk to Amanda Chenault, new Director of Campus Visits, about her experience so far in the position and her vision on the future of admissions. Because of a large office turnover during the summer, many of the faculty in the office are new. But excitement rather than nervousness suffused her words as Chenault spoke about the team.
“You would think that being all new would make it scary, but it actually has made it feel like a really safe place because everybody’s so excited,” Chenault said. “And there’s new energy, and everybody wants to see this flourish and we want to see each other flourish. So it’s like living in a group of cheerleaders.”
Cheerleaders is not a bad way to describe the team. Devoted to Union and each other, enrollment counselors and student workers alike love and encourage each other on a daily basis as they seek to grow our campus. I asked Fran Thomas, former Director of Campus Visits and now Assistant Director of Employer Relations, how she went about finding someone who could help lead the department well.
“It was important to me that somebody had a heart for others, had a heart for students, had a heart and an understanding for families and what they were going through, what they were experiencing, how they felt about the overall college search process,” Thomas said. “Because you can teach anybody to do the details of the work, but you cannot teach them how to care.”
After serving under Thomas for the past year, I’ll be the first to say she embodies all of those values incredibly well. She was an excellent leader, and the announcement that Thomas was moving to the Vocatio Center sent shockwaves throughout the team. Who could possibly lead as well as her?
But Fran Thomas’ voice was full of expectation and excitement as she spoke about Chenault. After serving in admissions for nearly seven years, Thomas is very familiar with the role Chenault has taken on. And she believes there isn’t a person more suited for the job.
“Doing something like this – it’s just figuring out who you are, while honoring the person before you and the work that they’ve done,” Thomas said. “It’s as natural a transition as I could have imagined just because of the skills that she has. I don’t have to teach her how to love and serve people well. She’s just a natural. She’ll be better than I was.”
I asked Chenault how she felt about taking on the mantle of Director of Campus Visits. For so long, Thomas was the point of contact for the admissions team. To take over her position could feel very daunting. In the words of Chenault, “It’s very large shoes to fill.” But rather than letting insecurity take over, she rested on the Lord’s promises.
“When those moments pop up – ‘I wish I was more like this,’ or ‘this person does this really well – why can’t I do it?’ – I think you just have to stop and hand that over to God,” Chenault said. “Because really, it’s an issue of contentment, right? We have to be content with how God created us to be and not want to be something different because there’s nothing wrong with the way that we are. We view it as needing more of something – needing more personality, more energy. But we are all so gifted in different ways.”
We talked about comparison and about how being content in who the Lord made you to be can be so hard when you take on a role someone else did so well in. But everyone has something different to offer, and the only standard of comparison we should look to is Christ, not each other. “Who could possibly lead as well as Thomas?” is the wrong perspective.
“You want to be like the person who came before, but I think we all are gifted in different ways,” Chenault said. “There’s ways that you’re gifted that she’s not and vice versa, so operate in the way that God made you specifically and use that to the best of your ability.”
She spoke of the passage in 1 Corinthians about the body of Christ having different parts; some people are meant to be the feet, others the hands, others the arms, and so forth. It can be tempting in a position such as Chenault’s to try and simply emulate the one who came before her. But Chenault is confident in the leader she knows the Lord has created her to be, unique from anyone else.
As I talked to both women, I was encouraged. Though they lead and serve in different ways on campus, their hearts for people and the Lord are so evident. Each conversation brought new wisdom and inspiration to my own life, and I left feeling more confident than ever not only in the Lord’s plan for their lives, but also in His for my own. Though Thomas did an incredible job with the Admissions department, I am truly excited for Chenault to step into the role and make it her own.
“I’m just radically thankful for the position,” Chenault said. “It wasn’t something I was looking to do, but I really feel like God brought it to me. And I’m really excited to see what God’s going to do with it.”
