The Baker Who Surrendered Her Business Plan

In 2019, Maria Gutierrez signed a five-year lease on a tiny storefront in downtown Waco, Texas, determined to open a Mexican bakery. She had spreadsheets, a marketing strategy, and a twenty-page business plan. Then the pandemic hit. Her savings dwindled. The grand opening she had choreographed down to the hour never happened.

One morning, kneeling on the flour-dusted floor of that empty shop, Maria stopped asking God to bless her plan and started asking Him what His plan was. She opened her doors — not as the upscale bakery she had envisioned, but as a community kitchen. Neighbors who had lost jobs came to learn baking skills. Local churches donated ingredients. Within two years, her little storefront had trained over two hundred people, and three of her students opened bakeries of their own.

"I handed God my blueprint," Maria later told her church, "and He handed me back a harvest I never could have drawn up."

Proverbs 16:3 says, "Commit your works to the Lord, and your thoughts will be established." That Hebrew word for "commit" is literally to roll something off yourself and onto another — the way you would roll a heavy stone away from your own shoulders and onto solid ground. The promise is not that God will rubber-stamp our agendas. The promise is that when we release our grip, the Almighty establishes something far sturdier than anything we could have engineered on our own.