Maybe you have read about a minister who

was preaching about how he was ready to die when he work

was over. Then he fell backward and died.

He had suffered

a heart attack. Although there were physicians in the

congregation, they couldn't do anything to help him. He

was dead long before the paramedics arrived.

The Associated Press picked up the story. So did

Yahoo. CNN reported it. You can still find the story on

the Web. Search for "minister," "Jack Arnold" and "dies."

Paul Harvey reported that "Pastor Jack Arnold's last

words were, 'And when I get to heaven,' . . . and he went!"

A spokesman for the church said it is not uncommon for

people to die on the job. Quite true, but usually they

don't die immediately after making comments about being

ready to die, unless they are on the local PD's bomb squad.

His son reported this on his blogsite:

Jack Arnold, 69, was preaching in

Orlando, Fla., on his life verse: "For to me, to

live is Christ and to die is gain." He quoted

John Wesley and pointed upward: "As long as God

has work for me to do, I am immortal, but if my

work is done, I'm outa here."

Moments later he spoke his last sentence about

heaven, stopped, grabbed the pulpit, swayed

briefly and fell backward. Medics say the heart

attack killed him immediately.

"He was just all there, and then not there at

all, like a hand came through the roof and

snatched him out of his body," said Chris

Williams who told me he was sitting in the front

row only five feet from where Dad

fell.

Rev. Arnold had not been famous in the way that his

seminary classmate Hal Lindsey is famous. Hal Lindsey is a

celebrity. Rev. Arnold never was.

He had been one of John Wooden's players at UCLA.

Coach Wooden sent this message to the church:

The circumstances of Jack's passing

was consistent with how he played the game of

basketball as a member of the UCLA team. He

always gave everything he had right down to the

very last second. He was not blessed with as much

physical ability as others, but no one worked

harder or was more highly respected than

Jack.

He was not a starter, and he was there early in

Wooden's UCLA career, before Wooden became legendary as the

coach whose teams won ten NCAA championships. But only 172

men played for Wooden, so it was some kind of honor.

Jack Arnold made a difference in my life.

I first met him in 1960. He was instrumental in

shaping my own thinking -- one of the dozen people who most

influenced me most, although I saw him only a few times.

He was a youth minister, as I recall. I did not attend his

church, but someone I knew at UCLA had told me I should

talk with him. That was good advice.

Before I met him, I had never heard the phrase, "Don't

let the good interfere with the best." This possibility

had not occurred to me. But the more I thought about it,

the more profound it seemed.

There are many good things that we can do. Each of us

possesses many talents. We possess many opportunities to

be productive.

THE LIBERATED PIN-MAKER

As I studied economics, I began to appreciate Adam

Smith's story of the pin-makers. Through specialization

and through capital equipment (tools), they are vastly more

productive than a specialist in pin production who makes

one pin at a time, step by precise step. He cannot compete

by price. He loses his job.

We tend to see this as a disaster for the solitary

pin-maker. Those other people, with minimal skills, have

destroyed his career. Hooray for them, we think. Tough

bananas for him.

This is the wrong way to look at the development.

Human labor is highly flexible. Unlike machines, we humans

can learn lots of ways to be productive. When we are freed

up from one task, we can learn a new skill. That's what it

means to get a promotion.

Smith warned that the life of a pin-maker in a factory

is boring and even demeaning. Who wants to go through the

same repetitive motions all day? Over time, machines

replace this kind of labor. That is good news for those

freed up to do more creative things.

We all fear losing our jobs. But when we are

displaced because a machine or low-skilled person does what

we do, but cheaper, we should see this as a liberation. I

don't want to be known as a man who spent his life doing

what a machine could do far better. Do you?

The man who lost his career to lower paid pin-makers

with machines was liberated. He could devote the remainder

of his life to work that offers greater opportunities for

displaying his God-given talents and vision. But nobody

ever thinks about what happened in 1776 to the newly

unemployed pin-maker.

Occasionally, I have met people who have lost their

careers. I can think of only one who was truly bitter.

Over 20 years ago, I was picked up at the airport by a man

driving a hotel van. He griped all the way to the hotel

about Ronald Reagan. He had been a well-paid worker as a

flight controller. When PATCO struck, illegally, against

the U.S. government to gain better working conditions,

Reagan stood his ground, refused to negotiate, told them to

go back to work, and warned them that if they refused, they

would be replaced. Most of them refused. Every one of

these hold-outs lost his job. They were immediately

replaced without incident by people who were happy to work

for the original wages. PATCO ceased to exist. So, this

new minimum-wage worker, driving that hotel van, got no

sympathy from me. He had suffered a self-inflicted wound.

He also got no tip from me. The only tip I should have

given him was: "Get over it."

I have suffered such a career loss. It was painful at

the time, but it liberated me. I can remember when it

happened. I had experienced what the departing University

of California Chancellor Clark Kerr had described a few

years earlier. "I am leaving this job just as I entered

it: fired with enthusiasm." I was lamenting my plight to

a woman who was probably younger then than I am now. She

said it had happened to her husband. She offered this

advice: "It happens at least once to everyone with any

talent. Regard it as a learning experience." So it was.

Within a few months, I was in Washington as a research

assistant to Congressman Ron Paul. Then it happened again:

he lost the election a few months later by 168 votes out of

180,000. I was back on the street again. But within

weeks, I went to work for Howard Ruff. And all through the

period, I had income from my newsletter, REMNANT REVIEW.

That is another lesson. I had a fall-back business.

I preferred not to touch that income. I used the money for

advertising to build up my paid subscriber base. I kept

getting better at this as I taught myself the basics of

direct-response advertising.

Note: the best piece of advice I did

not take at the time was from advertising genius

-- I did not perceive this at the time -- Dan

Rosenthal, who told me in 1973 to read Rosser

Reeves's "Reality in Advertising." I did . . .

20 years later.

In the month before I lost my government paycheck, I

began scheduling full-page magazine ads for a book I had

assembled from old copies of REMNANT REVIEW. Within two

years, I had sold (as I recall), over 20,000 copies at $10

each ($25 in today's money). I also convinced 2,000 of

these book buyers to subscribe to REMNANT REVIEW for $60 a

year. I never looked back. Three years after I lost my

government job, I had 22,000 paid subscribers.

My point is simple: adversity is the mother of

creativity. When we face brick walls, we find ways under,

over, or around them. Or we go into the brick wall

business and sell them.

I have known U.S. Marines in my life. None of them

ever told me that he would like to go through boot camp

again. All of them told me they were glad they did it

once.

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn once wrote that he was glad for

his years in the prison camps. The experience had stripped

him of everything he owned. He learned how to be a man in

a society that produced broken men outside the camps. In a

way, this was a variation of Kris Kristofferson's line,

"Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose."

Solzhenitsyn became Russia's most eloquent anti-Communist.

He did more to undermine Western intellectuals' respect for

Communism than anyone else prior to the fall of the USSR in

1991.

Of course, he survived the camps. Tens of millions

didn't. But persecution is an old feature of tyrannical

governments. There have been many victims of State

coercion. The question is: What does the victim do with

his opportunity? All of life is an opportunity. It is an

opportunity to do better, to serve better, and to make a

difference.

What seemed like a bad thing can be a good thing.

This raises another question.

WHY IS A GOOD THING SOMETIMES A THREAT?

This brings me back to Jack Arnold's observation. How

can the good interfere with the best? Answer: By blinding

the do-gooder to best-doing.

When we are doing well by doing good we are tempted to

rest on our laurels. We continue to do the same old thing.

It's comfortable. We like the comfort of the familiar when

the money is rolling in. "If it ain't broke, don't fix

it!"

Yet things around us are broken. There may be money

in fixing them. There may not be. But lots of things are

broken. They need fixing.

In 1981, I was talking to a man about the concept of

the calling. As I was talking, something became clear to

me for the first time. A job is not usually a calling.

The two categories had been confused for centuries.

Even Max Weber ("Mawx Vayber") had gotten them confused in

his influential book, "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit

of Capitalism." Like a flash, it hit me. We put food on

the table with our jobs. We gain significance from our

callings. I came up with this definition:

Calling. Noun. The most important

thing you can do in which you would be most

difficult to replace.

When a man hits age 45, he begins to think about his

calling. If he is successful in his job, he has achieved

success. But success loses its allure. It grows familiar.

It's the same old stuff, day after day. It makes the world

a little better, day by day, but it adds nothing new. He

is mostly in replacement mode. "Now what should I do with

my life?"

There are exceptions. Someone in medical research who

is working to invent a cure for a dreaded disease probably

has the sense that he is being paid to exercise his

calling. He may achieve significance, or he may not, but

significance in this case is a matter of invention, which

cannot be programmed. (Well, maybe it can. Thomas

Edison's research organization produced over 1,000 patents.

But there has never been another Edison.) He sticks to his

knitting. He may not achieve significance by sticking to

his knitting, but he surely will not achieve significance

if he doesn't.

For men, significance is rarely salaried. It's a

trade-off: security vs. significance. For those few who

rise in the ranks, the trade-off becomes success vs.

significance.

Men are employed in jobs that have specific

requirements. Others can replace most of them within

hours, if necessary. Some man working in a cubicle can be

gone the next day: heart attack, firing, or running off

with the next door neighbor. The corporation barely burps.

"Replaceable him."

As a father of pre-adult children, the missing man

leaves havoc behind. Yet he did not earn a living as a

father. He earned a living to support himself as a father.

His job was his occupation. His fatherhood was his

calling, at least for a time.

There are lots of men who let the good -- job --

interfere with the best: fatherhood. This is a widespread

lament by many Western men when the kids are gone . . . and

maybe their wives, too.

MONEY VS. TIME

We trade money against time. We can see this in the

allocation of scarce resources. There are two ways to do

this: by price or by rationing. The two boil down to these

rules: "High bid wins" vs. "stand in line." "Stand in

line" is a variation of "first come, first served." It is

the difference between Federal Express and the Post Office.

If you had been flying over East Germany and West

Germany in 1988 -- and not been shot down -- you would have

known which country you were flying over by two things:

cars on the highway below and the length of lines in front

of buildings. West Germany had the cars; East Germany had

the lines.

When you are long on time and short of money, you

perceive the trade-off differently. Ben Franklin, in Poor

Richard's Almanack, made this observation: "A child thinks

that 20 pounds and 20 years can never be spent." An adult

knows better.

By age 45, a man looks at his job and thinks, "Been

there. Done that." The marginal value of the next dollar

begins to fall in relationship to the marginal value of the

next minute. If it doesn't, he may become the next Warren

Buffett. Or maybe the next Bernie Ebbers.

The sand running through the hourglass -- an archaic

image that Bill Gates creatively adopted for digital delays

-- reminds us of the trade-off.

At some point, the trade-off usually ceases. The

money is rolling in, but at some point won't be. For most

people, their money runs out before the sand does, which is

what the debate over Social Security is all about. The

occupation dies before the job-holder does.

What was a trade-off at age 20, 45, and 64 ceases upon

retirement for most men. Money then runs out alongside of

time. They both seem to run out faster and faster.

It then becomes difficult to finance your own

significance.

The trade-off between security and significance ceases

to be a trade-off. Security departs, and significance

never arrived.

This is why money, while good, is a threat to the

best. When money is on short supply -- at the beginning

and at the end -- it makes heavy demands on us. It becomes

a siren song. It threatens to addict us. This is what

Jesus meant by "mammon." It means "more for me in

history." It is a false god. It is also a demanding god.

Significance must be funded -- always by time, usually

by money, too. Time is money. To spend time on non-profit

A, you must forfeit the income that project B might have

generated.

There is no escape from this. The sooner a person

grasps this fact, the more significance he is likely to

have.

Significance must be funded, steadily. Funding --

usually by time -- must become habitual. This leaves less

income for other things.

Men groan about the cost of significance in forfeited

money. "I'm just barely making ends meet as it is!" Then

they spend three hours a night watching TV. They are

trading money for leisure. They are also trading

significance for leisure. Money isn't flowing in, but

neither is significance. Time is flowing out.

"Free television." I would sooner believe "I'm from

the government, and I'm here to help you."

CONCLUSION

I think of Jack Arnold in the pulpit. What he

achieved in death, he never achieved in life, either on the

basketball court or in the pulpit. The timing of his

parting words, which was not his timing, was flawless.

I also think of the last words of Pete Maravich,

surely the most spectacular white ball handler and shooter in

basketball history. He was the supreme collegiate ball

handler/scorer. He was playing a pickup basketball game at age 40.

Radio family counselor James Dobson was on the court, and

he heard Maravich's parting sentence: "I feel great." One

minute later, he was dead. Maravich had already admitted

to Dobson that he had spent too much of his life playing

basketball. He had been famous. His scoring record in

college ball still stands. Yet he knew that he had not

allocated his time wisely. What had appeared to be

significance had really been a high-paying job. Celebrity

status is not significant.

Leave service out of it, and you have misunderstood

the basis of any success you have had or will have.

Success starts with service. So does significance.

Choose your forms of service well.