The cannery rocks, or paying it forward, part II

On Friday evening after work, I had the opportunity to do something I hadn't done in years. Myself and about 15 other members of our church ward headed to Sacramento, where we cleaned, sorted, peeled, processed, canned and labeled hundreds of thousands of tomatoes.

It was a job so enjoyable that I never even bothered to ask what time it was, or complained about being on my feet or the fact that my hands looked like prunes when I was done.

It was that much fun. I vividly remember working at the cannery about four years ago, and how fun it was to sort through tons of tomatoes, and then use these fire hoses to clean up the mess several hours afterward.

On Friday, I was working with a very fine gentleman from a nearby ward to bring the tomatoes off the truck and load them into the conveyor belts to be sorted and processed. We were, you could say, the first ones on the production lines.

A little about this operation, if you've never been: What they have in Sacramento truly defies description, if only because the people who run the place, nearly every single one of them is a volunteer from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. We don hairnets, rubber gloves and aprons and go to work. It's in a huge facility, with conveyor belts, overhead canning lines, and tables where the product is sorted.

Essentially, we are "civilians" doing the Lord's work. We don't get paid, and we don't need to. We get an ice-cream sandwich when we're done after about a five-hour shift.

I was working with a gentleman from a ward near mine. He has six children, all of whom served missions, and a gaggle of grandchildren. All but one of his kids lives far away. I asked him a few questions about life as a missionary, and tried not to delve too much into my own situation.

But you know something? After hours of standing on my feet, I never felt tired, I certainly was never bored, and I felt like I accomplished something. I told a friend of mine in the ward how much "the cannery rocks" and that now I wish I would be in church on Sunday to bear my testimony about how much I loved doing that work.

I told the man I worked with that I found it fascinating that for one day, all of us -- owners of businesses, working mothers, reporters, engineers, teachers, insurance brokers, executive assistants, delivery drivers and retirees -- became experts in our field for one day. We stood side-by-side with one another to get a job done. No one cared what walk of life we came from, how much or how little we made, or even how strong our testimony was. We all just worked together. We laughed -- I even saw a friend of mine whistling -- joked and worked together.

It was an amazing thing, to be sure. And I think that's exactly how Heavenly Father wanted it to be.