Read this in the devotionals for Women of Faith. I struggle with this very thing every day. I love creating yet it doesn't pay the bills. My wonderful husband takes care of that. My two part-time jobs wouldn't handle everything. What I create and sell, well, there are good months and not so good months and now preparing for a major craft show next month....and is it all in vain in the big scheme of things? No, but it does wear on me....not pulling my weight, not working full-time even though "full-time" is really a figure of speech in the large picture (a women's work is NEVER done)....for she sees things that always need to be done, down to the tiniest speck on the carpet!!! HAVE been busy in so many other areas....it is often a fight within to get upstairs into my craft room. There are other places I want to be, too, like at the weekly sing along and devotional at one of our nursing homes, maybe helping with bingo, painting nails, visiting someone, reading to the little ones at the library....always calling my name and I love it....but the balancing act is SO HARD. That struggling catepillar turning into a butterfly!!! I'm 47! I should be that beautiful butterfly by now, but most times, I feel as though I am still struggling out of the cocoon! Anita Renfroe from Women of Faith shares about all of this in a much more eloquent way than I can say.....
My heart took delight in all my work, and this was the reward for all my labor. — Ecclesiastes 2:10 niv
I saw Anderson Cooper (of CNN) give an interview recently, and in it he responded to a question regarding the best advice his mother (Gloria Vanderbilt) ever gave him. He responded that she advised him to follow his bliss and the money would come. He had a dream to be a reporter and he now anchors each weeknight with his own news show. I don’t know what your “bliss” might be, but I urge you to find a calling in life and attach it to your work.
Whether you have a job and wish you didn’t, or don’t have one and wish you did, or if you wish you had different people to work with or report to, the dailyness of your workplace can become a mental drag if you don’t choose to see it as a place of purpose and mission. The Bible gives us clear principles regarding whatever labor we undertake. Read Colossians 3:23, Luke 9:62, Romans 13:1, Matthew 7:12.
These scriptural principles allow us to see that we are working for more than a paycheck, that we are committed to endurance and excellence in any undertaking, and that our Real Boss doesn’t inhabit the corner office, but has it all in his hands.
— Anita Renfroe
Excerpted from A Grand New Day © 2008 by Thomas Nelson. Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by Thomas Nelson. Used with permission. All rights reserved
