Sixteen Tons

How do I know where I am supposed to work? I have a job now. My husband is job-seeking. I get job offers and interview requests frequently. How do I know if I should go to another place or stick it out here?

Well, if you don't know, how on earth can I help you? What's your job? What are the job offers? Do you have to move? Would you make more money? Would you have more time or less time for your family life?  Is where you work now a horrible sinful place where you are surrounded by evil? Are your co-workers dragging you into a life of sin?  Are you put upon so much so that you feel used and abused?  Is there health insurance?

You have to ask yourself every one of these questions. Make a pro and con list.   In the end, if this is the only job that has health benefits, stay.

A job isn't just a job.  It can be where you spend almost all of your time.  You are giving all your time away for what, exactly?

1. Fulfillment. All jobs are not created equally.  Some are mind numbing, sand pounding days of dullness as thick as a layered bean dip.  Some are kind of pleasant at best.  And some are important and engaging. 

But don't think that if you are just a bean counter or a shelf stocker that your job can't be fulfilling.  As long as you do your job with a sense of purpose, that sense of doing good work and being needed will stretch itself across your life.

If you find yourself "phoning it in" everyday, maybe it's time to move on if there's someplace to go. As long as that place has health insurance.  Don't go from a job where you have insurance to one in which you don't.

2. A paycheck.  This is nothing to sneeze at!  Are you making enough to make ends meet?  Do you need more for food, rent, clothing?  If the answer is yes, you should be looking for something better.  Don't go backwards in your salary.  Unless you don't have insurance now and the new job pays a little less or the same but has benefits.  Then it's worth the move.

3. Loyalty.  Also nothing to sneeze at! There's not enough these days.  Still, you have a family to take care of, even if your family only consists of you and your husband just now.

I get the idea that your job is no fun.  But why?  This is an important question.  It could be that it's just not fun, what you do, like being a public defender.  No fun and low pay.  But perhaps a  great sense of fulfillment. 

There are reasons to stick it out if your job stinks.  That paycheck. Those benefits.  If you're just put upon, or your co-workers are icky to you, the only way you are going to survive is to change your attitude, because they are not going to change.

I believe that one of the reasons the world never changes is that, for the most part, human beings have the tendency to say to themselves, "Why am I the one who has to bend over backwards to accommodate these clowns?  They should get it together!"  That's why Jesus was such a radical. He said to everyone, "No. You have to love them as you love yourself. You have to change to behave that way.  Chances are it won't change them. But it will change you."

Meanwhile, we turn to St. Joseph the Worker, our patron saint of workers.  Granted, he didn't have someone in the next cubicle snapping their gum and making personal phone calls at the top of their lungs and eating whatever food is in the break room whether it belongs to them or not.  But he did have the whole town looking at him sideways because of the unusual situation with his wife and son.

We all have our crosses to bear.  I hope yours has health insurance.