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PROGRAM D-8394
How do you find contentment in a job you hate? If you find yourself in a job you don’t like, you need to know that you can learn to be content right where you are. When you learn this, you are in a win-win situation because you no longer allow yourself to be a victim of your job circumstances.
If you want to learn to be content with the job you hate, ask God what he has to teach you through it. Have you gone to God and said, “Lord, I’m in a job I hate and I can’t get out. Why am I here? What are you trying to teach me or do through me in this job?”
You remember Joseph, sold into slavery in Egypt by his brothers, treated unfairly and cruelly by his captors, and wrongly imprisoned for two years for doing the right thing? Then God delivered him from that prison and he became second in command to the Pharaoh. Joseph said of his bad experience that his brothers meant harm to him when they sold him into slavery, but God meant it for good. Joseph allowed God to turn a terrible experience into a blessing. But please note that God was able to turn it into a blessing because Joseph was willing to let him.
God may have you in that job you hate because he has a blessing there for you but, because of your attitude, he can’t work that blessing for you yet. If Joseph had gotten bitter, remained angry, or been rebellious, he would not have been able to interpret the Pharaoh’s dream and he would have rotted in that prison.
Are you rotting in your miserable job because you haven’t given God permission to use it in your life for good? Believe me, there are miracles waiting for you in that job you hate—if you will in humility make up your mind to work for God, seek his reward, and look for the good that God wants to do for you and through you right where you are. You’ll know contentment even in a miserable job if you have that attitude in you.
It’s the attitude that Jesus had when he was willing to leave heaven and come to earth to die for us. Surely it was a job he didn’t relish, but he knew God would work redemption through it, and so he submitted to the good that God wanted to do by sending him to a job he did not enjoy.
Let this same mind be in you which was in Christ Jesus, Paul wrote, and if you have his mind, you will be content wherever you are—even in a job you hate—as long as God has you there for his purposes.