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PROGRAM D-8301
Have you ever thought of your workplace as God’s classroom for you? This may be a totally new thought for you—that God can use your job, the people you work with and for, and the atmosphere where you work as a training course. I must confess that I didn’t always see my job that way. God never wastes anything in our lives. He uses every experience, every person, every struggle, even our failures and sinful choices, to teach us something we need to learn, so that we can move forward—closer to becoming more like Jesus.
Having this attitude about your job—looking at it as a training course, so to speak—could make it a bit easier to get up and go to work every day. It gives new meaning to your work days, even if those days aren’t always pleasant. When you start to see the lessons God wants to teach you through your job, it’s a paradigm shift—a new perspective that gives meaning even to the mundane and tedious work, even to the irritating relationships, even to the demanding boss or heavy workload.
Think about this: No matter what you do on your job each day, you have developed skills and abilities through that job which are valuable. I have a friend who is teaching communication skills in a very different and difficult cross-cultural environment. As she was telling me what she does and how she has learned to communicate in this challenging setting, I told her that what she is learning through her experience in this job, though difficult at times, is giving her skills and abilities that are rare and very valuable. She’s learning “on the job” as we say, and that knowledge and skill is giving her very important and marketable skills which you really cannot learn in a classroom.
Certainly that’s been true in my life, as well, as I spent many years conducting training seminars in my company and for many other companies across the country. This experience of putting together and making an effective presentation is a skill that God was teaching me through my job—and one he now uses for ministry purposes.
Think about what you’ve learned through your jobs and how God is using—or maybe how God wants to use them—in his service.