On the Green Chain

Saturday night I received a phone call. "Our Sunday School lesson tomorrow is about the value of work. I wonder if you would be willing to share an early experience that taught you to work hard." I agreed, and this is the experience I shared with the class.

As a teenager, I grew up in the little sawmill town of Edgewater, BC. When I graduated from high school I found work at the local sawmill. The mill had three different saws producing lumber. One was a "gang-saw" that produced several boards simultaneously. As boards were sawn from the logs, they were put on a conveyor called the “green chain” for sorting and piling. My job was to pull boards off the conveyor onto the appropriate pile before the next board came along. Some of the boards were 20' - 2 x12s that probably weighed as much as I did. If I missed a board, it might drop off the end of the conveyor and that was definitely a “no-no”.

I learned two important things from this job.
Firstly, I learned to work hard.
Secondly, I learned that I didn't want to do that job for the rest of my life!

Within a few weeks, a friend invited me to join him in Calgary to pursue a higher education. I accepted his invitation and left the sawmill. When the sawmill closed a few years later, I was living half a world away in France. It is interesting to reflect back on life and the course of events.