Building Relationships

Puppeteering is more than just sticking your hand up a puppet, sticking the puppet above the stage, and lip syncing to a song. Puppeteering is also something that you do as a team. You have to be able to work with the other people on your team in order to make the songs you perform look the way you want them to. While a puppet ministry isn't strictly about the entertainment factor, it is still nice if the songs look put together well because the more an audience gets into a song, the more likely they will hear the message that the song is portraying. Anyways, if you can't work with the other members of the team, what kind of a team is it really? If you do teamwork right, you can get to know some great people and you can build relationships with them. 

 1 Peter 3:8 “Finally, all of you should be of one mind.  Sympathize with each other.  Love each other as brothers and sisters.  Be tenderhearted, and keep a humble attitude.” (http://christianbiblelife.com/verses/13-bible-verses-to-restore-and-strengthen-relationships)
When you are working with a team, you should all have the same goal in mind. For a ministry, a reasonable and expected goal would be to share God's Love and Word with the world. However, if someone in the group has a different goal in mind, it will effect the success of that ultimate goal, especially if the other person's goal works against sharing God's Love and Word with the world. I Peter 3:8 also says to sympathize with each other and to love each other as brothers and sisters. In order to really succeed as a team, the members need to be able to care for and respect each other. You don't want to seclude anyone because if they do not feel like they are part of the team, then they may not put in all of their effort in order to help the team succeed. The last things this particular verse says to do is to be tenderhearted and to keep a humble attitude. This goes along with caring for and respecting the members of the team. If a team is going to be a team, everyone needs to see everyone's strengths. If everyone thinks they are better than everyone else, there is sure to be some issues in the area of working as a team. 

Within a team, while working with different people, you are able to build meaningful relationships. You get to really know people. Yes, you get to know the other members as puppeteers (or whatever kind of team member it would be in your case), but you also get to know them as people. So, I am going to tell you about just one of the people I have gotten to build a relationship with through puppets (with a couple other people mentioned as well). There were other people I got to meet and know as well, but I don't want to make this just a list of people (which is why this post got put off to begin with). I just want to make sure to tell about one person just because he really does show how great puppeteering can be for building relationships .  Plus, this is what I had eluded to in a previous post so I did kind of need to include it.

 Andrew is my honorary big brother. We got along well and it sort of just clicked. Anyways, I met him when my parents and I started working with Heaven's Handful. His family had been involved with puppets for years, and he had officially started puppeteering when he was in the 7th grade. As he got better and as time we on, he moved into leadership of the team. 
After we worked with Heaven's Handful for awhile, Andrew even started doing most of Adventureland's shows with us. So, with how often we did shows, we saw quite a bit of Andrew. Especially since he came to our practices and shows, and we went to Heaven's Handful's practices and shows. However, since his parents, Steve and Kerry, were also involved with Heaven's Handful, we also got to meet and know them. So, we get together from time to time for things even outside of puppet events. It is just nice to know that God let my family and I meet Andrew and his family through working together with puppetry. 

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To see the rest of the posts from this series please click here