Article from Marianne Williamson's New Book "The Law of Divine Compensation"

Marianne Williamson has just released a timely new book THE LAW OF DIVINE COMPENSATION: On Work, Money and Miracles. We are delighted to bring you the following article adapted from this terrific book.  

Job vs. Calling - Part One  

One of the most positive transitions you can make is from viewing your work as a job to viewing it as a calling. A job is an exchange of energy in which you do a material task and someone provides money in exchange. A calling, however, is an organic field of energy that emerges from the deepest aspects of who you are. It is the fulfillment of what God has created you to be and do.  Approaching your work as a job versus approaching it as a calling makes all the difference in whether or not you dwell in the miraculous universe. You have a calling simply because you are alive. You have a calling because you are a child of God.  You have a calling because you are on this earth with a divine purpose:  to rise to the level of your highest creative possibility, expressing all that you are intellectually, emotionally, psychologically, and physically in order to make the universe a more beautiful place.  As you do this, your entire life becomes your ministry — a way to serve God and to serve the world.

If you’re thinking of money only as something you get in exchange for doing a job, then you’ll never be free of limited thought forms surrounding money.  We are heir to the laws that rule the world we identify with.  If you identify only with the material plane, you place yourself at the effect of pretty severe economic realities of scarcity and lack.   If you identify with the spiritual plane, you are under no laws but God’s.

“I’m looking for a job,” “I’m trying to figure out what I should do”, and “I don’t know how I am going to make ends meet” are sentences that confuse the universe.   A child of God doesn’t have to “look for a job”; a child of God doesn’t have to “figure out what to do”; a child of God doesn’t have to worry about “how ends will meet”.  A child of God is simply a magnet for all things good.   The youwho thinks of life as a struggle, or a place where you’re on your own, is not the real you.   The real you already has a God-given function, and the universe is set up to support it.

The best way to summon your true calling is to put your true self in service to God.   The following daily prayer is from A Course in Miracles:“Where would you have me go? What would you have me do? What would you have me say, and to whom?”

While a job is separate from the rest of our lives, a calling is a fulfillmentof the rest of our lives.  By striving to bethe best that we can be, we create the internal blueprint by which we dothe best we can do.  On a soul level, we wantto work, we wantto create, we wantto be productive and serve others and share our gifts to the world. Often it is not external forms of obstruction that hold us back, but rather internal ones.  And nothing releases us internally more than the desire and the willingness to serve.

The world can give you a job, and a job can be taken away.  But a true calling puts you in a career zone that cannot be taken away.   It reflects your willingness to do what you feel inwardly led to do in order to help heal the world.  The universe then registers your true substance, your true seriousness, and your true purpose.  Some things you do will bring forth worldly wealth; other things you do will not directly bring forth wealth at all, but—being the right things to do—will summon wealth miraculously from the other sources.

Losing a job does not mean losing your calling, because as a personal ambassador of God, you have been given a permanent assignment.   You are here to represent Him who sent you, and He does not change His mind about you.  You are never unemployed by God.  And that’s true not just about you; it’s true about all of us.  Anything that appears to separate us from each other is not the deepest level of our identity.   We all have different jobs, but the same ministry.  Some of us are technicians, some of us are mathematicians, some of us are writers and artists, some of us are salespeople, some of us don’t even work as work is defined by the world—but our value, individually, is determined not by what we do but, by the consciousness with which we do it.  We’re all here to be available channels for the love that heals all things.  A job takes a form, but our ministry is content.  Even if you lose your job you still have your ministry, because it is a part of who you are.  Your life has no less value if you’re not employed as the world defines it.  If you’re kind to people, if you’re compassionate, if you pour your excellence into whatever you’re doing, then you’re doing the job God sent you to do.  From that will emerge the next form that’s needed to host the energies you’re bringing forth.  Does that mean that you don’t have to “look for a job”as the world defines it?  Of course you do! But you do it with a different consciousness.  You don’t show up for a job interview thinking, “How do I impress them? I really need this job.” Rather, your process goes more like this:

1. You place your need for work in God’s hands.
2. While alert to every opportunity that presents itself, you put enthusiastic energy

into brainstorming and creating newpossibilities.

1. You pray and meditate asking for internal guidance as to whom to call, what to do, and so forth.
2. You realize that you can’t know what or where your next job should be.
3. Before you go to a job interview, audition, or meeting, you blast every person you’re going to be with —and the situation itself—with light and love.

Your goal becomes simply giving and receiving love—which is another way of saying, “May God’s will be done.” You see every interaction as a holy encounter. 

You intend for this and every situation to be one in which you express your truest, most brilliant, most loving self—and what happens beyond that, you leave to the intelligence of the universe.  You’re not going to the interview to try to geta job; you’re going there to doyour job!

Those five steps might seem as if they are just little things—hardly the operating principles that move the universe. Yet that is exactly what they are. On the spiritual plane, you have no competitors. There is no competition for your position, as you are a unique expression of the Mind of God. You not only have a place in the universe; you have an essential functionin the universe. Only you can do the job of being you, and the universe itself is left incomplete without you. It is not arrogant but humble to realize this, as you place yourself in service to the greatest drama there is: the actualization of your own potential.

In the words of Confucius, “Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.”

Adapted from the new book THE LAW OF DIVINE COMPENSATION: On Work, Money and Miraclesby Marianne Williamson and is reprinted with permission of HarperOne, a division of Harper Collins ©2012

Marianne Williamson is an internationally acclaimed author and lecturer. Six of her ten published books have been New York Timesbestsellers including A Return to Love, The Age of Miracles, Everyday Grace, A Woman’s Worth, Illuminata, Healing the Soul of Americaand The Gift of Change.In December 2006, a Newsweek magazine poll named Marianne Williamson one of the 50 most influential baby boomers.

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