This post was originally posted on ChristianStewardshipCoaching.com July 22, 2014.
So as we talked about in Part 1 and Part 2, you are having a hard time making ends meet.
You get to the end of the month and you still have more month left than you have money. Maybe you find that you can't pay your credit card bills on time every month, or even worse, you find yourself falling behind on rent or your mortgage.
So, is this an income crisis....a debt crisis....or a career crisis?
Let’s look at Career Crisis now….
This is strongly related to the discussion we had in the first post in this series about having an income crisis. After all one of the big determinants of your income is your career. But when looking at income you realize that you may be having to bring on more income in the short term to break a log jam. That log jam is often brought on by debt as we looked at in the debt crisis post. Career crisis is about more than these, its more about the long term decisions we make.
If you are in a bind where you really can't make ends meet then you need to move the needle by increasing income and decreasing outgo as quickly as possible. Once you've done this though and you are making things move when it comes to the monthly expenses you need to step back and look at the long term fit of your career.
So how do you evaluate it?
Are you in a job where you have to trade time for dollars and the rate is rather small? In other words to make more do you have to increase the time you spend to a level that isn't sustainable over the long term? If so you may want to evaluate your career.
The word career comes from the Latin carrus which describes a wheeled cart. The root word can also describe a road and even a race. If you think about it that's why we call our "job" a career. It really is the "transportation" that can take us into creating a better future. But even more interesting is realizing that the word career doesn't really capture things that create meaning for our lives. Let's look at another word that we sometime use to describe our jobs....vocation.
Vocation comes from the Latin vocare or vocis. These words mean a call or voice. This word is used to describe the call that ministers and priests feel when going into the ministry, but really should be used to describe any of us do. Why? Because when we work we should always work as a form of worship to the Lord. We should always seek ways that our career serves others and ministers to others. That is the path to both financial and spiritual wholeness that allows us to sustain work over time in a way that really feels right.
So if you aren't in that type of place.
If you are working in a situation that doesn't fit your calling or work in a way that feels like it serves others well you may need to continue that while getting rid of your debt and breaking the income log jam, but then you have to find a way to transition intelligently to something that really serves your callings. If you need some help thinking about your calling you can contact us here.
If you'd rather learn by reading and studying on your own I'm including some affiliate links to some resources that I've found helpful in thinking about my career below
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