Christ's parable of the Talents in one of the most important of the parables dealing with our responsibilities to Him while we are still in our physical bodies.  You will recall that He talked of three men each of whom were given different jobs and abilities to accomplish these jobs while their master was to be away.  Two of them did the very best they could with their abilities and resources.  The third, however, was so afraid of failure that he did nothing with his abilities and he was so afraid of loosing his resources that he hid them securely away.   When their master returned, he greeted the first two with the words, "Well done my good and faithful servant." Each was given this highest of award regardless of the type of ability or resource.  The main thing was that each had done the very best he could given his tools.  However, the third was rebuked for having wasted his time and accomplished nothing for fear of failure.  
      Most of us today who study the parables agree He is telling us that each of us has been given different abilities and resources to to which apply them.  AND, we believe, that we sincerely hope that we will be greeted in Heaven with,  "Well done my good and faithful servant." 
      The following true story is given to support that concept:  (The names have been changed for obvious reasons.)

      Joseph Franks was a man who had been very successful in his business but had now grown very old.  Joseph knew that he had to pick from among his three top Vice Presidents the man who was to succeed him.  However, he was not at all certain as to which of the three would make the best new leader for the company, Joseph had spent so many years building.  So, he devised a plan.
     He called his three vice presidents in for a meeting. In this meeting he informed them that he was going a to have to go to a health resort for about a  year, and that they would have to run the company in his absence. His instructions to each of the three was as follows: 
      He instructed his vice president of marketing, Tom Goodsell, to continue the sales as he’d been doing in the past. And, he also told him to start a new campaign for a new product that had just been developed.
      His instructions to his manufacturing vice president, Larry Schnellmacher, were to continue building the products that the company had always built but in addition he was to work up a good manufacturing procedure for the new product.
      Tony Guddenken, Frank’s vice president of engineering, was given a slightly different project.  Tony was told that he should come up with yet another new product to add to the product line as soon as the product that the other two vice presidents were working with had begun to saturate its market.
      Tom quickly called his staff together and told them that they would have to do much of the work he had been doing on their current products so that he might devise and put into execution a plan to market their newest product. Then he laid out a plan for their activity that was as thorough as needed to be without making himself guilty of micromanaging their activity.
       Tom then begin working day and night to learn as much as possible about the market that existed for the new product.  First, he checked to see what competition was doing in this field.  He found that the principal competition came from IBM, RCA,, and two much smaller companies.  All four of these companies, it seemed, had copied the basic idea of television in gathering the information necessary to be able to read human readable characters by a machine. The Joseph Franks Company had built a machine which was able to look simultaneously at all of the data within a character.  The result was that all of the competition could only read about 200 to 300 cps  (characters per second) whereas the Franks machine could read 2000 cps. On the other hand.  The Franks machine cost $750,000 while the other four companies machines cost only about $100,000.  However, the Franks machine had a reject rate of only one or two per hundred characters read whereas the four competitive machines rejected about 50 percent of the characters.   
      Tom knew that the need in the marketplace for machines such as those he and the other four companies had, was to replace the expensive method of inputting data to a computer by the use of punch cards.  Tom also new that the costs of finding reading errors and fixing them was much greater than the money to be saved by a reading with the four competitors machines.  However the number of data input jobs which could be read directly by machine are relatively small.  At best they probably represented only about 20 percent of the work.  Therefore, Tom’s next job was to learn all he could about modern keypunch machines.
      Tom learned that there were two basic types of keypunch machines.  The 024 and the 029.  the 024 was very easy to program but it was a very dumb machine.  That is if you told it that you wanted to be able to input a number as high as one million in a particular field you would always have to put 7 characters in that field position.  The 029, on the other hand, could be taught to skip over unnecessary columns but this required some extra training of the keypunch operator.  It also required a more highly trained programmer.  Tom learned further, that because of the feel of the keyboard a good operator could only do about fifty (five character) words per minute.  The 029 permitted word rates of fifty-five to sixty words per minute. However, a good typist can type from eighty to one hundred twenty wpm.  
      Armed with this information Tom believed he could sell the Franks reading machines fairly easily.  This turned out not to be the case. He found the managers of the keypunch department did not want to get rid of all of their keypunch operators and bring in a few typist to replace them. Then Tom had an inspiration. The idea was not to attack the speed of the keypunch operators compared to typist’s but rather to look at time cost of all of the programming steps within the keypunch machine.  This approach worked and Tom was able to set up a worldwide marketing operation which sold many millions of dollars worth of the Franks reading machine.  
       Lary Schnellmacher, of course, had quite a different problem.  The Franks reading machine had to be built using some of the first transistorized computer parts.  These parts were not to easy to find. Further, techniques to build equipment using these parts was not well-established and it was hard to find people who could advise Larry on good methods of manufacture.  Larry was not as ambitious as Tom and while he did a good job of researching manufacturing procedures for these new pieces of equipment, he didn’t spend much power of ordinary office hours doing it.
     The net result was that a number of mistakes had to be made.  For instance, soldering the components into the printed circuit boards by hand was very expensive.  It also led to a number of bad soldering giants and mistakes.  A new device called a wave soldering machine had been invented and once Larry learned of this he bought one.  However they didn’t realize that special chemicals had to be put on the boards to prevent corrosion of the small leads from the board to the components.  After one of his machines had been and the field for about half a year all of the components began to fall off of the board.  This meant that he had to recall several of the machines and replace all of the printed circuit cards that had been built using the improper wave soldering chemicals.
     As a result of Larry’s problems and lack of attention at critical times Tom’s sales of the machines soon out ran Larry’s ability to produce them.  Larry thought this would certainly not make Joseph Franks happy when he returned.  He hoped that Franks knew Larry had done the best that he could, but wished he had put more energy into the final solution so that Larry's department could have kept up with Tom's department's sales.
     Tony Guddenken, was quite a different story.  Throughout his life as an engineer Tony had been taught that he earned his pay by being creative.  He could have gone to various libraries, universities and so forth to see what was going on in the data entry field but he did not.
      Tony might have checked with some of the sales to people to see what  they would like to have in the future but he did not.  He didn’t even ask to see some of the recent professional literature being used by the sales and manufacturing people.
      What he did do was to sit in his office and think every day.  This thinking without any knowledge of what was needed in the field or being done in the field led to nothing useful.
       The lack of Tony’s leadership in the engineering department meant that field engineers went improperly trained and this resulted in problems with some of the Company’s best customers.  And, of course, nothing new came from the engineers in Tony’s department.
       When the year was over, and Joseph returned,  a new meeting was called.  Joseph asked each of them to tell what had happened during his absence.  
       Tom told Joseph that he was happy to report that he had been able to sell more than twice the number of reading machines that they had originally estimated.  He went on to report that they had been able to get into not only all of the United States but also most of Europe and Japan. 
        Joseph responded, “Well done!  My good faithful friend.”
        Larry told Joseph that he had been able to manufacture the new machines but that because of a number of problems he had not quite been able to keep up with the production required by Tom’s excellent sales job.
       Joseph responded, “I’m a little disappointed in your performance bit I am sure that you did the best you could.  Thank You my good and faithful friend”
      Tony reported that he is spent a great many hours thinking but had not been able to create a new product as yet, however, and because of his work on the new project he had not been able to properly run the engineering department.
       Joseph responded that he was very disappointed.
       Joseph now explained the reason for his being gone the year.  He told them that he had given each of them difficult tasks in order that he might see who was the best problem solver among them. Thereafter he might select his successor from among them.
       He then shook Tom’s hand, and congratulated him on being the new first vice president and the man he expected would succeed him when he retired next year.
      He then spoke to Larry and told him that he would certainly hope he would continue on as vice president of manufacturing and that he would learn from this experience that nothing succeeds like hard work and doing your master’s bidding. 
     Finally he turned to Tony.  “Tony, I am very disappointed and feel that you  need to be demoted to a member of the engineering staff.  We will have to find someone else to fill your job as vice president of the company.”
 

      This leads me to ask you, “have you made the most of the talents that God gave you and are you doing everything in your power to exercise them to the full extent of which you are capable?”  
       If the answer is no, what do you intend to do with the next days of your life?

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The Congregation Sings:  Dear Lord and Father of Mankind.