Have you ever thought of your workplace as God’s classroom for you? This may be a totally new thought for you—that God can use your job, the people you work with and for, and the atmosphere where you work as a training course. I must confess I didn’t always see my job that way. But God never wastes anything in our lives. He uses every experience, every person, every struggle, even our failures and sinful choices to teach us something we need to learn, so we can move forward—becoming more like Jesus.

Having this attitude about your job—looking at it as a training course, so to speak—could make it a bit easier to get up and go to work every day. It gives new meaning to your workdays, even if those days aren’t always pleasant. When you start to see the lessons God wants to teach you through your job, it’s a paradigm shift; a new perspective that gives meaning even to mundane and tedious work, even to irritating relationships, even to a demanding boss or heavy workload.

Think about this: No matter what you do on your job each day, you have developed skills and abilities through that job that are valuable. I have a friend who is teaching communication skills in a very different and difficult cross-cultural environment. As she was telling me what she does and how she has learned to communicate in this challenging setting, I told her what she is learning through her experience in this job, though difficult at times, is giving her skills and abilities that are rare and very valuable. She’s learning “on the job” as we say, and that knowledge and skill is giving her very important and marketable skills you could not learn in a classroom.

Certainly, that’s been true in my life, as well, as I spent many years conducting training seminars in my company and for many other companies across the country. That experience of putting together and making an effective presentation is a skill God was teaching me through my job—and one he now uses for ministry purposes.

Think about what you’ve learned through your jobs and how God is—or maybe how God wants to use that in his service.