Occasionally the seemingly insignificant things that happen to us carry a deep meaning, if we will take the time to reflect on them. Here is an example:
We had been doing puppet shows for children in India for two years. Our theater was a contraption of PVC pipes. It was easy to assemble and take down, but it looked a bit shabby. People would say, “You have a great show; all you need is a good theater.”
We had thought of ways to improve it, and then a funny thing happened that gave us a big paradigm shift.
A year earlier, some friends had told us they were cleaning out their garage. They had two curious bundles of poles and cloth but didn’t know what they were for. They offered them to us. No instructions accompanied them, so their purpose was a mystery.
The bundles sat in our storage for a year. Then one day, we took the poles and cloth out of the bag. We were like kids playing with blocks to see what we could build. We kept trying, and eventually, to our amazement, a structure started to take shape—a professional puppet theater worth hundreds of dollars!
Here we had been struggling with our homemade contraption for a year, when all along we’d had a fantabulous theater sitting in a bag waiting for us to discover its true potential.
How often we have something in our hands that would make life so much easier, but we just don’t realize it. We try to fix up the old instead of letting go and discovering a better thing just waiting for us.
Curious as to how the puppet bag had gotten there, I did some detective work and found out that several years before, a team had come from the US with the idea of doing puppet shows. They had abandoned the bag in that garage. Several years later we had it, but it still took some experimenting to realize what an asset it was.
How many art masterpieces or valuable manuscripts were discovered after years of storage in someone’s attic? The owners thought they had a trinket when in reality they had a treasure. We too have great treasures, yet we don’t always appreciate them as we should. They could be our family or friends that we have neglected or failed to appreciate, or perhaps God’s written Word that has been gathering dust on our bookshelf, waiting for us to read it to be revitalized and transformed.
To fully utilize our resources, it can take effort and maybe some experimenting to see how the pieces fit together to create its beautiful whole, but when we do, it can transform our lives.
A few days later we did a puppet show and the hostess commented, “I heard you were good, but after seeing your performance, I must say, you were great! And I loved your theater!”
I smiled, thinking of the back story of the theater that almost wasn’t.