Puppets and miracles

Mom, I hope you’re reading this post because I want you to know that you played a part in what I call a small miracle.
Oddly enough this miracle was birthed many years ago in a story my mother found in Highlights for Children magazine. The story was called "Why Crow Crows" and although it revolved around farm animals and a noisy crow, the central theme was accepting those who are sometimes hard to accept. My creative mother took this story, wrote it into a puppet show script, created stick puppets and recruited my father and myself to perform this puppet show for her Sunday school class and for our church. They loved it. So mom decided to create another puppet script using the same puppets. This puppet show was based on the story of the Prodigal Son found in Luke 15:11-32. Since we were re-using the stick puppets, she titled it "The Prodigal Crow" (the prodigal son was a crow, the father an owl, and the obedient son a chick…our other farm animal stick puppets had either retired from their acting careers or signed lucrative contracts with Walt Disney).
Fast forward to the present….or actually last Friday morning. The members of our house were discussing the program for our final day of Logos for this six-week session. Logos, as I may have mentioned before is a once-weekly after school children’s ministry program….in theory anyway. In reality it’s organized chaos. Combine a bunch of tough little kids from a poor neighborhood with a bunch of kind and loving adult volunteers who desperately want to minister to these kids and change their lives, but have all we can do to get the kids to just sit down and listen to us, and pour all these people into the sanctuary of a little church in Spokane’s West Central Neighborhood and you get Logos!!
We’d been planning to tell the kids either the story of the lost coin or the lost sheep through puppets, but someone decided that would be too hard and suggested we tell the story of the Prodigal Son instead. I thought of the puppet script my mother had written long ago and said "I think my mom wrote a puppet script about the Prodigal Son. I’ll e-mail her and ask for it." Mom e-mailed the script. I edited it so that "crow, chick and owl" read "Bob, Joe, and Father." The narrator became Jesus, because we have a Jesus puppet. We substituted "You Ain’t Nothin’ but a Hound Dog" for the song "La Bamba" as dance music in the part where the prodigal squanders his money on wild living (although CCR’s "Fortunate Son" would’ve been the best fit there). We rehearsed twice before Logos started. I played the narrator/Jesus puppet part. Vergy, the girlfriend of one of my housemates, and an incredibly good puppeteer, played Bob, the prodigal son. Brandon, and Jessica (Westminster House missioners, like me) played the parts of the Father and Joe, the obedient son.
The kids arrived at Logos and tumbled off the bus full of the usual energy and insanity. One small group refused to play the games at game time and insisted that they like to eat people. Two other boys kept running behind the shed no matter how many times I told them "please don’t go back there. It’s Game Time, go play games!!" I led Music Time and it was much the same. There was some singing going on, but a lot of kids ran around. A row of fifth and sixth grade boys in the front pew hurled insults at me as I played my guitar and sang. I felt a pang of disappointment as I thought of our cool puppet show and that half the kids probably wouldn’t even hear it because they’d be talking and goofing around. Music Time ended. Jason (another Westminster House missioner) read the story of the Prodigal Son from the Children’s Bible. We puppeteers silently arranged ourselves behind the puppet stage and Jason announced "And now it’s time…for.. a…. PUPPET SHOWW!!"
I raised my narrator/Jesus puppet above the stage and twisted my wrist to make him look around for a moment. I couldn’t see any of the kids from behind the puppet stage, but I realized that for the first time that entire evening this group of kids was silent. They were so silent you could hear a pin drop. We did the entire puppet show and all I heard was laughter at the funny parts and an occasional whisper. When we finished and said "THE END!" I heard thunderous, ecstatic applause! This noisy, raucous, belligerent group of children was not only captivated by our puppet show, but they applauded at the end! I didn’t know these children could be that quiet! I am awed, and stunned and totally amazed. And I am thankful to my mother for sharing with us the puppet script she wrote for my Sunday School class many years ago.