Making a Living is Not the Same as Making a Life

To me, to work on the job that I love is crucial. It is THE most important thing. But, how do we get there?

A friend called me in the middle of the night, vented on how she doesn't like her job. She's a food scientist; her works involves creating formulas for food scents and taste substitutes. She experiments with bacterias, chemical, and all that good stuff I don't understand, but interesting to hear. But this is the first time I heard that she doesn't like her job. She wants to quit, but doesn't know what else to do.

I told her that some days in our jobs sometimes made us want to quit that day. It happens to me too; what I usually do is to revisit our motivation: why we do what we do, that would encourage us to love our job again.

The one thing to pursue what you love to do, and the other thing is to give up on what we have now. Life needs to be discovered all the time! Including now. I understand what my friend was saying that she hated the job because she felt like it doesn't make a difference. Let's stop there and we discuss that later. But, when I asked her if she had a chance to go back to college, what was it that she would it be? And she said, she would take the same thing, since she loves being in the lab, working with bacteria and discovering new formulas. Well, that's it, then. She found what she loved already.

Let's go back to her idea that the job doesn't make a difference. Of course it does; it helps create a better tasting food, the food would help feed people; her job is a piece of the puzzle of the complicated network of the food industry that exists because of demand: it provides to life.

But the other day I was reading about this book called "Finding the Road Map: Railroad Nation Series". It's a book contains stories of people who succeed in what they do. One of the sentences that I read, was a quote from Albert Einstein "Who you are is not determined by what you do." But, my thought came back to what I have heard, that Jesus loves us no matter what we do. That, the love of Jesus itself, could be, or should be, our main motivation to love what we do, or to discover what we love to do, and do that the best we could, for the Glory of God. But if finding our talents and our gifts and using it to enrich our lifes and others, is an act of worship too. Loving your job is a state of mind. Go, baby. Go!