What if I hate my job?

Hey, thanks again for sending in questions related to our recent sermons. You know, we’ve been going through Mark in this last week. We talked about the disciples and how they had been working, advancing the kingdom of God. And Jesus tells them to take a rest and then before too long he tells them to work again, handing out food to at least 5000 people. We talked about how to be satisfied in our work.

So the question comes in this week, but what if I hate my job? What if it’s really torturous for me to get out of bed in the morning and go to work? How can I really end up with satisfaction on a daily basis? How can I come home and sit down and survey what I’ve done and really feel content in my heart? How can that happen when I hate my job so much?

Well, first, like we talked about in the sermon, and I’m assuming this is not your particular case, who asked this question? Because you heard the sermon and then you asked the question. But for everybody else who might be listening, I mean, the first question is really to ask yourself what are you trying to get out of work? And like what we talked about in the sermon, if you’re looking to work to define you, to give you worth, to write the purpose of your life, it will really never give you that. It’ll never completely secure your future.

And so if work equals security for you or if you’re trying to make it create security for your future and that is the reason why you’re working or you’re working in order to feel good about yourself gives you this positive self image, you’re just chasing your tail, you’ll never get there. Work will never provide that and you’ll always be dissatisfied. So if you switch jobs, that won’t help. If you take a vacation, that won’t help.

You’re looking for the wrong things out of work and then of course you’ll be dissatisfied as a result. But assuming that you’re not looking for those things out of work and you’re really trying, I mean, the best we can, I don’t think any of us are ever 100% there, but we’re trying as best as we can to find our significance. Satisfaction, security in the Lord, first and foremost, most primary, and yet we’re still work is really somehow misaligned with us. You might be in the wrong job and you’ve really got to take a step back and say, what is my gifting?

What can I contribute to the world? And that might mean, it might mean less money for you. That might mean you need to move. It might mean lots of things, but you’ve really, I mean, you know, look in the rear view mirror and say, how did I end up in this job? Why do I feel trapped here?

And maybe there’s something different for me. You can ask those questions and you can process them with the Lord. And we all should do that, because God really does have a plan for all of us to contribute to the world somehow, based on how he built us, our particular giftings. He also built us with the passions that we have of how to spend our time. And so we should look at those.

We should look at how we can best contribute to the world. And then kind of the intersection of all of those things, our gifts, our passions, ways that we can add to the goodness of the world, then we can find something that aligns in that intersection and go out and try to do that. But again, even then, even if we really do find something that lines up with our passions, gifts, what the world needs, where we can add to the goodness of the world, if we find something that lines up in all of those areas, but we’re looking to that to make us feel like we have worth.

We’re looking to that to make us feel like we have security or meaning in the world. It’ll always let us down, because, as we said, it’s a terrible lord.

But, hey, feel freedom. You don’t have to stay where you are. God can lead you somewhere else, and it’s okay to go look. So thanks for the question, and we will see you next time. Bye.