Your Career: Love It or Leave It?
If you're in a career or job and feel it's time for a change, you may find yourself asking a similar question to a popular cable TV show on HGTV, Love It or List It.
The popular show features a man and a woman as the hosts of the show, and a couple who are dissatisfied with their current house. The male host, a real estate agent, is to interest the couple in listing their home and buying a new home. The female host, a designer, is to design changes in their current house that will entice the couple to stay.
The plot thickens when the wife wants to stay in their home with changes and the husband wants to move, or the reverse happens.
You Have Two Choices
Applying this model to your job or career, you have two choices. You can change your career or job, or you can make changes in your current job or career that will help you stay where you are. As in the TV show, you'll often be of two minds, especially if you've been in the career or on the job for a long time.
Ask yourself if you're clear about your career direction and your life purpose as it relates to the purpose God has for you. God created you for a reason. It makes complete sense that if you prayerfully align yourself with that purpose, you will find fulfillment and success, the kind of success God blesses.
Explore All Your Needs
You have to explore your internal needs and external needs, your personal value and goals, and how your career and your work matches those requirements. Your life purpose is not what you do on a daily basis, what you do for a living, your short- and long-term goals, or even the vision of who you want to be and what you want to be doing in 10-15 years.
Your life purpose is why you exist, what God has called you to do. Finally, ask yourself how you can best know God, love God, and serve God in the various areas of your life, including your career.
Here Are Some Useful Questions to Ask Yourself
What do I like about my career or job? What do I dislike?
What are my internal and external needs at this time in my life.
What are my personal values and professional goals.
Do I believe my current career is in alignment with God’s purpose for me? If not, what would I change? What can I change?
Would I be more effective and fulfilled working as an entrepreneur? If so, why?
Does my current career and work allow me to serve others the way God wants?
Additional reading:
Listen to God's Words
Commit your work to the Lord, and your plans will be established. Proverbs 16:3
For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope. Jeremiah 29:11
Was I vacillating when I wanted to do this? Do I make my plans according to the flesh, ready to say “Yes, yes” and “No, no” at the same time? 2 Corinthians 1:17
Also read: Proverbs 16:9, Isaiah 14:2, John 15:16, Romans 8:28
In the Words of Others
So, though there are many things I could have done differently, I submit to God's sovereignty and His purpose in my life and I thank Him that He brought me the way He brought me and gave me what He gave me when He thought I could handle it.
T.D. Jakes
The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The purpose of life is to contribute in some way to making things better. Robert F. Kennedy
The purpose of human life is to serve, and to show compassion and the will to help others. Albert Schweitzer
Think About It
What do you like about your career or job? What do you dislike? If you’ve been thinking of making a change, why?
If you were to make a change, what needs would be important to you? List them in detail.
What personal values and professional goals would guide the type of change you would make?
Do you believe your current career is in alignment with God’s purpose? If not, what would you change? What can you change?
Does your current job or career allow you to serve others the way God wants you to serve?
