What to Do Next: Biblical Wisdom for Your CareerSample

The worst thing is not being unsure of what’s next; the worst thing is being unable to pursue what’s next when it arrives.

Which means the best thing you can do now is create optimal options.

Imagine that tomorrow you’re offered an opportunity that sounds too good to be true. It’s a team of people you want to work with… except you’ll have to relocate. Or it’s the kind of work you dream of doing… except you'll have to take a pay cut.

If you’ve created optimal options, those drawbacks aren’t dealbreakers.
When you’re debt-free, you have options.
When you have multiple income streams, you have options.
When you have a larger personal network, you have options.

Creating optimal options is about putting yourself—financially and personally—in a position to say yes when what’s next arrives.

So how do you do that? Today’s verses give us two action steps.

Get your financial house in order. Many of us read Jesus’ declaration that “you cannot serve both God and money,” and think, He’s not talking about me. I don’t care about money that much. That might be true, but you might still be forced to serve money one day.

If you can’t pursue an opportunity God is calling you to because your student loan payment is too high to take the pay cut… Or if you can’t accept a job you were made for because you don’t have any savings to cushion the risk of leaving your current role… you’ll learn the heartbreaking truth that “you cannot serve both God and money.” Creating margin in your finances means you can serve God when he leads you to make a change.

Develop a personal advisory board. One of the greatest pieces of advice you’ll ever receive is the better counsel you have, the better answers you’ll find. When you put yourself across from wise people and ask them great questions, it will catapult you closer to your next best step.

What is a personal advisory board? It’s a group that will help you process decisions and plan for the future. Mine is four (older, wiser) people; yours could be more or less. Every six weeks, I seek their advice because I have found, as Proverbs says, that “plans fail for lack of counsel, but with many advisers they succeed.”

You might not know today what tomorrow holds for your career. But you don’t have to let what you don’t know rob you of what you can do. Get busy creating optimal options by building financial margin and a roster of wise advisors. One day, you’ll be very glad you did.