A friend of mine called me a while back. His wife had left him.

I'll call him Chris. She told him she'd felt abandoned for years. His kids didn't take his side. They barely know him, and what they do know, they resent.

He never saw it coming. As far as he could tell, he was doing everything right. I believed him, because I've been in a similar situation.

Chris is a machinist. For fifteen years he's been the only senior guy at his shop, because nobody else sticks around. He told me he couldn't trust anyone else with the work. If it wasn't done right, it was his job on the line, and his family's paycheck with it.

So every rush order landed on him, every vacation got cut short, and every dinner went cold waiting on him.

It worked. He made his family more money than they'd ever imagined.

He gave them everything except himself.

I've thought about that call a lot. Chris was so afraid of being irrelevant as a provider that he became irrelevant as a presider.

That's what fear can do to you. Walk you straight to the place you were running from.