In the mid-1970s I was a forestry contractor in southern California, and I had just finished a five-acre job clearing an area of firebreak. I had driven my large Buick Electra car to the job, but its’ starter was no longer working. With only $44 left after paying my chainsaw crew, there was no way to get back home to my home in northern California.
That week I decided to walk the seven miles from my campsite to the nearest town as food was low and the starter had to be fixed. The Forest Service officer was supposed to meet me at a designated point in the road at a rock to inspect the completed work. The officer came the next day. As a Forestry officer, he could not take me and the car to town to get it fixed in his official government vehicle because of government regulations that prohibit transporting non-government personnel, but he offered to tow me up the dirt road a ways.
I hopped in his truck. Up the road we went, and he let me off (the car and myself) in a small forest clearing. I walked the rest of the way to town, carrying the starter. In town I had no luck getting the starter repaired or finding a replacement, so I started back. “Dear God, what am I going to do now?” I thought!
Feeling tired, holding the starter in my hand, I still had a mile to go. Suddenly I heard and saw a battered pickup truck coming down the dusty road. It stopped. I could see half a dozen chain saws sticking out of a log, and large drums of gas and oil in the back. A logger!
He hollered out, “Where are you going?”
“I am going to my car.”
“Hop in,” he said.
We got to talking, and he hired me on the spot. When we reached the forest clearing where I had left my car, it turned out to be the exact site of the timber sale location he was working!
I worked for him as a faller that season. (The faller is among the most skilled positions in a timber crew because they choose the direction that they want the severed tree to fall to the ground.) God had not only blessed me with more work, but the logging was also good! One tree after falling was six feet diameter on the stump. At the end of the season, I had enough pay to buy my boss’s flatbed truck, which I used to haul my Buick Electra back home, and had plenty for tithes and offerings.
“Then call on me when you are in trouble,
and I will rescue you,
and you will give me glory” (Psalm 50:15, NLT).
By Jim Allen, retired Firebreak Cutter, First Timber Faller, and Scrap Metal Dealer
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