GLOBAL SERVICE NETWORK STORIES

Why do you hate your job and what can you do about it?

My first job out of college was as a design engineer. I hated it. Every day I came to work, I felt like I was trading away my time for a paycheck. The trouble was the paycheck never seemed worth it. Life is short. One must eat but there is no paycheck worth the loss of the majority of your waking hours. I hated my job because I did it for a paycheck pure and simple. Work was part of God’s design, yet it is also a fallen thing.

Because of Adam and Eve’s sin, work was subject to frustration. “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you…by the sweat of your brow you will eat your food.”  (Gen. 3:17-19)  Instead of work being a meaningful and joyful thing, it would be about merely surviving. Translate that to 2015 and it means you go into work every day merely to keep your family fed and pay the bills. Isn’t there more to life?  In short, yes. Where we go wrong is in working for the paycheck.  If you do this, you embrace the fallen aspects of work and you ignore the blessed aspects.

Work is all about striving, doing something meaningful, accomplishing something, being creative and excelling. I love my current job.  I lead a Christian ministry that provides software as a service to ministries so they can succeed in their mission. I love coming into work every day because the work is creative and meaningful. If you hate your job, seek work that is meaningful and creative. Those are the best kinds of work. Work hard at your job and seek to accomplish something. Why? We as humans are meant to strive, to reach and to try big things. We weren’t meant to be cogs in a machine. If your job is merely to take things from your inbox, process them and put them in your outbox, then you probably hate your job. Now here is the hard part. To move away from the cog type job to one where there is meaning and creativity means risk. We all fear failure. The truth is that God made you for something great, so have courage. Take the risk.

Learn more about Kenneth Rustrum’s ministry with Vituramis