Job Satisfaction

Friday I left my 5th and 6th grade classroom for the last time. Though I've been dissatisfied with my career for quite some time I wasn't prepared for my lack of emotion. I kept waiting to cry, to feel great sorrow wash over me, but it didn't. I walked away and felt nothing.

My father always tells me, "You're good at it and it makes money, you've just got to stick with it. You don't have to like your career." My mother never says much, but her looks and sighs imply everything. It makes me wonder if the need for job satisfaction is a generational thing.

Lets face it, in generations past job satisfaction wasn't a priority. You needed to take care of yourself and your family; you did what made you money. Maybe they didn't have enough time to allow themselves to need to be happy with their jobs. Whatever the case, it was usually about making a living, not about being satisfied.

When I talk to teachers who are about to retire, or look at old texts, I realize that teaching today is a whole different world. Teachers today, more than ever, are over worked, over stressed, pushed, pulled, prodded, and underpaid! The work they require out of teachers is astronomical! Have jobs changed so much that we have created the need for job satisfaction?

Our modern society has twisted and turned. We aren't anything like ten-fifteen-twenty year ago. Business runs differently. Machines and modern thinking have changes the way everything is done. We have created completely different ways of accomplishing tasks. A job isn't just a job anymore; it's your life style. Jobs are no longer just about supporting your family, they have become and extension of who you are as a person.

Maybe job satisfaction isn't just about generations, it's a whole new world; a society we create for ourselves.

Closest Weekness

I began rereading Hinds' Feet On High Places today. The struggles of Much-Afraid to resist her ancestral weaknesses struck me stronger than before. When told by the Shepard that she should never even allow her relatives to tempt and torcher her she exclaims:

"I know, oh I know, ... but whenever I meet any of my relatives I seem to lose all my strength and simply connot resist them, no matter how I strive."

Her cry seemed to be the cry of a thousand hearts. How often do I fall prey to the weaknesses that lie nearest to me? The ones that I am so familiar with, the ones I should have long ago over come! Yet the familiarity is exactly what ties my hands, making me sink to my knees feeling helpless. Shaking in fear I often find myself unable to resist. It is that things closest to us that can render us completely powerless.