Transcript
Speaker: I had to stop looking for the big thing.
Speaker: Because I had this in my mind as a young man that, okay, whatever I'm doing now is the small thing.
Speaker: And eventually, all of a sudden, there's gonna be this big thing.
Speaker: It's gonna be big and huge.
Speaker: It's gonna be the thing, and it's gonna have flashing lights on it that says, Chris's career.
Speaker: And God's going to be standing behind it, holding it like a cheerleader going, this is it, Chris, this is the big thing I have for you, isn't it great?
Speaker: He never did that.
Speaker: There wasn't a sign.
Speaker: There was just him.
Speaker: Hello, everybody.
Speaker: Welcome back to Artists of the Way.
Speaker: I'm John, the host.
Speaker: Today, I'm joined by Chris Knobloch.
Speaker: Chris is somebody I've known a couple years, a few years now.
Speaker: I guess it's been a little while.
Speaker: But Chris and I got acquainted through Master Arts Theater, and he is the vice president, director, and... Oh, darn, I forgot the last title.
Speaker: Writer.
Speaker: You do some writing for...
Speaker: God's Helping Hands, which is a traveling ministry.
Speaker: Well, traveling, you're based in Michigan, but they tour around to different churches, focusing on discipling and teaching children through art and especially through puppet ministry, which I'm excited to delve into some of that puppetry.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: How are you doing today, Chris?
Speaker: Great.
Speaker: I'm doing great.
Speaker: And I appreciate you inviting me on.
Speaker: This is going to be fun.
Speaker: Yeah, I'm excited.
Speaker: Guaranteed.
Speaker: It was kind of last minute, so thanks for being willing to jump right into the deep end and like... That is all right.
Speaker: Let's do it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So a couple questions that I ask everybody at the start.
Speaker: First, I want to know what are the things that you're working on right now artistically, either with God's Helping Hands or kind of as your own little side projects?
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: So God's Helping Hands uses creative methods to deliver an unchanging message.
Speaker: And that means we are always busy finding the new, fun, interesting, intriguing, engaging ways to deliver the message of Jesus Christ.
Speaker: And that's primarily for us to boys and girls.
Speaker: So we do use a lot of stage puppetry.
Speaker: I'm a ventriloquist.
Speaker: There's a lot that goes into both of those things.
Speaker: And we, well, we could do a deep dive and it would take, well, we could take a long time.
Speaker: We won't need to take all that time.
Speaker: but what that means is that there's always irons in the fire we're always developing new things uh some of them are like the the the small up close things and some are big picture things so right now up close things we are working on the material that we'll be using uh in 2024 we're in 2024 but we launched new material
Speaker: every summer and run it for a year.
Speaker: So we're working on the stuff that we're going to be releasing when summer comes.
Speaker: We're working big picture on some very large projects that will really increase our ability to reach boys and girls with the gospel in some really neat new ways.
Speaker: And then personally, because I'm not busy enough, apparently, I'm
Speaker: I always have some things going.
Speaker: Just today, I was working on a composition, a music composition, getting that written out for a choral ensemble.
Speaker: So that's just another little side thing.
Speaker: But there you go.
Speaker: That answers the question a little bit anyway.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: What kind of materials do you guys put out for God's Helping Hands that you're making yearly?
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: So a lot of what we do is live.
Speaker: So we're doing live presentations.
Speaker: We use a lot of full stage puppetry when we do that.
Speaker: We travel at any given point in time.
Speaker: We may have 40 or 50 puppets with us at any given point in time out of our stock of characters.
Speaker: So that's a lot of live stuff.
Speaker: But then in addition to that, we're producing things that are not live, that are resources for boys and girls, for their parents, for their churches.
Speaker: So we have a line of materials we call Simple Lesson Solutions.
Speaker: And out of that line, we have curriculum for classrooms that we produce.
Speaker: Also, every week we produce a podcast, an audio podcast for boys and girls using a couple of our puppet characters.
Speaker: And so every week I'm writing those so that those can be produced.
Speaker: And you know everything about that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That's awesome.
Speaker: Oh, darn, I had a question and it went away from me.
Speaker: Well, that's okay.
Speaker: It's gone now.
Speaker: It'll come back if it's important.
Speaker: Yeah, we'll circle around.
Speaker: What are some ways that you feel like in your life and in this season, God's using art in your life as you intake it, as you read or watch something or listen to some music?
Speaker: Oh, in my life personally.
Speaker: Oh, well, I love to read.
Speaker: And I don't get to do it, you know, sit down with a book as much as I used to.
Speaker: So I have gotten to where I consume a lot of my books audibly so that whenever I'm doing something else, I can be listening.
Speaker: And sometimes I get into new stuff and sometimes I just pull out old stuff.
Speaker: Right now, I just finished listening to Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer.
Speaker: Boy, I hadn't looked at that in forever.
Speaker: And it just, it was fun all over again.
Speaker: And to take a look at a little slice of Americana in a very unique way, because Mark Twain was a very unique writer with some very unique and interesting
Speaker: interesting philosophy behind the things that he wrote.
Speaker: Not always would I agree with him, but it does give a different perspective and reminds you, okay, there are whole schools of thought that we're dealing with.
Speaker: And art is the expression of many of these schools of thought.
Speaker: It's a great way to convey messages is when you use different art forms.
Speaker: So whether that's reading, like writing,
Speaker: what I like to do in my spare time or, or watching visual presentations of the things I read.
Speaker: I just started a BBC released a new, it's not new now.
Speaker: It's a couple of years old.
Speaker: I'm just catching up a new adaptation, a film adaptation of the,
Speaker: James Harriot's All Creatures Great and Small.
Speaker: So I started with that.
Speaker: Of course, those books are fantastic.
Speaker: They've been around forever.
Speaker: And I've read them multiple times.
Speaker: It's fun to watch a new depiction of those books.
Speaker: Anyway, that was a rambling answer.
Speaker: How do you like that?
Speaker: That's okay.
Speaker: I love a good rambling answer.
Speaker: I'm curious for you, because for Christians, I mean, as a Christian artist, I think that idea that you are...
Speaker: putting out some kind of message or school of thought or worldview, most of the time is pretty present.
Speaker: Like, I feel like that's one of the big struggles is like, am I preaching or am I creating or how am I doing both?
Speaker: Things like that.
Speaker: Do you feel like, because you have experimented with a lot of different forms of art, you know, we obviously have been connected through the theater world, right?
Speaker: A lot in music.
Speaker: do things in the puppetry world, and then you're reading things as well.
Speaker: As you create things, and creating things for God-helping hands in particular, which is kind of more geared towards discipling and teaching children, but still has an artistry there, versus if you're creating a musical or a play that you're putting out, and might be either more
Speaker: mature if you want to use that word or sure yeah raw do you feel like those use different parts of your brain do you feel like you're flexing different artistic muscles or like your approach to those are different or do you try and kind of keep it keep the approach you would take as as the same as you can with the different things if that makes sense it might let me see if the answer fits the question how about cool
Speaker: If it doesn't, I'll ask the question.
Speaker: That was nothing like what I was saying, Chris.
Speaker: For me, the best art is the art that is relatable.
Speaker: And that means it can take many different forms and still be the same kind of effective.
Speaker: If I'm consuming something, a piece of art, whether it's a painting or a piece of music or something I'm reading, I'm
Speaker: I'm fine with it challenging me to think in a new way or a different way.
Speaker: But if it goes beyond being relatable, then it isn't really worth a lot to me as the consumer.
Speaker: When I look at God's word, which is the constant, it's fascinating to see that this
Speaker: This book or this library of 66 books that God breathed out, that he inspired men to write, is so fascinating because he communicates with every kind of person.
Speaker: So if you are a history buff, there are books of history.
Speaker: If you are into poetry, the scripture is going to speak to you.
Speaker: There's poetry in there.
Speaker: There is romance stories and adventure stories.
Speaker: There's war strategies and there's dialogue and there's monologue and there's all of these things wrapped into one single story.
Speaker: and it is all communicating it in a relatable way.
Speaker: The Word of God is relational.
Speaker: In fact, God calls himself the Word.
Speaker: He gives himself that name.
Speaker: What a thing that the God of the universe, this cosmic being of infinite, unstoppable power and knowledge—
Speaker: can reach into and wants to reach into the lives of his creation, he gives himself the name, the word.
Speaker: He said, I want to communicate with you.
Speaker: And when he did it, he did it in a way that was extremely relatable.
Speaker: So I think art should imitate that whenever possible.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: Yeah, that's good.
Speaker: Did that answer the question we were going for?
Speaker: It did.
Speaker: No, yeah, because that's the through line, the relatability or the truth of that.
Speaker: That's the connecting point.
Speaker: And I think that that's something that you can have, whether you're doing Les Mis or whether you're writing something for a skit for church.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: It doesn't need to sacrifice realness and truth.
Speaker: And I think that that's maybe where sometimes church skits or a traveling ministry or something like that, I feel like artistically, artists can kind of look down on that.
Speaker: At least I've experienced that, and I know I've been guilty of that before.
Speaker: I'm like, oh, that's that kind of...
Speaker: that kind of thing, I probably won't like it.
Speaker: I think that's because sometimes it's sacrificed the realness or the truth.
Speaker: I shouldn't say truth, but like the relatability of it to just kind of give a diatribe, you know?
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: You know, it reminds me of... See, now I'm going to go to the scriptures again here.
Speaker: I love the scriptures.
Speaker: Let's go.
Speaker: There you go.
Speaker: And the Apostle Paul, he's talking about this phenomenon that was being experienced in the church at the time of speaking in another language, speaking in a foreign tongue.
Speaker: He's like, boy, if you've got the ability to speak in another language, that's fantastic.
Speaker: But you know, and I'm paraphrasing, of course, you know, he says...
Speaker: it's kind of important that the people listening can understand you.
Speaker: Otherwise you're impressing yourself.
Speaker: You're enjoying the fact that you can do it.
Speaker: That's awesome.
Speaker: But if you want to communicate with somebody, speak in a way they understand.
Speaker: That's a paraphrase of course.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: No, but I love that.
Speaker: And I feel again, like even in my like experiences in school and even in my own studies, I'm like, it's, I'm always impressed when I see somebody in a discussion board,
Speaker: or I see a professor who can explain this really complicated thing and do it really simply.
Speaker: I'm often more impressed with that than with somebody who's had a great, like revelatory, world-changing idea or observation.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Because if it takes you 40 pages...
Speaker: to unpack that using mostly eight-syllable theological words that refer to 2,000 years of church history that even I as a Bible school student don't entirely understand.
Speaker: I'm like, where's the value in that?
Speaker: But the ability to take these grand...
Speaker: things that are beyond us because it's from God and then be able to distill it down to such simple language that a child can understand and then can hit any of us in such a profound way with a simple sentence I'm always impressed with.
Speaker: Let me give you an example of that that really hit me a couple years ago.
Speaker: I was studying on the subject of light.
Speaker: Now, light, scientifically speaking, is a mind-blowing thing.
Speaker: It's a particle and a wave.
Speaker: Okay?
Speaker: I'm already over my head, by the way.
Speaker: And as I studied this, I realized I'm looking into...
Speaker: quantum physics.
Speaker: That's what quantum physics is.
Speaker: It's the study of light and trying to understand how it works.
Speaker: And nothing is faster than light and the speed of light and all these things.
Speaker: And you can go so deep into studying light.
Speaker: And it's really cool.
Speaker: And some, I mean, this is what Einstein was doing.
Speaker: He was studying light and how all the different waves of light
Speaker: It just fascinating stuff.
Speaker: And you can spend and people do spend their entire lives and entire careers trying to understand this.
Speaker: And they still can't quite wrap their mind around it.
Speaker: But a little child can go in a room, flick on a light switch and experience all the benefit that that brings without having to understand how it works, how fast it was traveling, knowing it is hugely beneficial.
Speaker: Because the more you know, the more wondrous it becomes.
Speaker: But that doesn't mean it's any less effectual for your life.
Speaker: And isn't that neat, though, when we go a little further here?
Speaker: Here, I'm rambling again, but I'm going to do it because it's worth it this time.
Speaker: That God, Jesus calls himself the light of the world.
Speaker: And the application is the same.
Speaker: The more we study about God, the bigger He gets, never smaller.
Speaker: We serve an infinite God, and so we can study and learn about Him for infinity and always be learning something new.
Speaker: But...
Speaker: A child can come to him.
Speaker: In fact, you have to come with the heart and faith of a child, just accepting that he is who he is before you understand everything about him, because you never will.
Speaker: Yeah, I think that's, and I've talked to your brother Nate and Ellie about this too.
Speaker: We've been kind of unpacking some of this together, the idea of like the mystery of God and embracing God.
Speaker: that and just being willing to like accept the things that you don't understand.
Speaker: And we apply that in some different ways because we have some, you know, different like doctrinal things that we're at different perspectives.
Speaker: But like that general virtue of like, we can do our best to understand and categorize and study and go deeper and we always will.
Speaker: But there's also, I think, a lost virtue of
Speaker: And my audience is probably tired of hearing me say this, too, because I feel like I've said it every other episode.
Speaker: But there's this lost virtue of just being like, I don't know.
Speaker: And that's cool that I don't know.
Speaker: And I'm willing to accept and hold on to and believe something that I don't entirely know because I never will.
Speaker: And I think...
Speaker: There's just something profound about like the placement of that when you look at yourself and almost freeing in that, I feel.
Speaker: Oh, freeing.
Speaker: Yes, because I used to be concerned quietly, not out loud because it sounded terrible to say out loud, but inwardly I was concerned, a little worried about the concept of forever in heaven with God.
Speaker: Forever is a long time, John.
Speaker: I mean, forever, you know, it lasts forever.
Speaker: And in my little puny pea brain human mind, I'm going, what am I going to do forever?
Speaker: isn't forever going to get boring?
Speaker: I mean, after the first million years, and I haven't even started, won't I have run out of interesting things?
Speaker: And then going right back to what we said a second ago, if God is infinite in everything he is, if he's infinitely good and infinitely just, if he's infinitely powerful and infinitely knowing, and he's all those things, he's also creative.
Speaker: And if he's infinite in all of his attributes, it means he's infinitely creative.
Speaker: It means there will never be an end of new stuff.
Speaker: Hey, look at this, says God, 14 million bajillion years out into eternity.
Speaker: I never saw that before.
Speaker: I'll say, of course you haven't.
Speaker: He says, I just created it and I'll keep doing that forever.
Speaker: Now my head hurts.
Speaker: I love that.
Speaker: I'm curious, kind of going back to that, like that simplifying thing, because that's very much.
Speaker: what you deal with with God's Helping Hands.
Speaker: That's what anybody in children's ministry deals with.
Speaker: And there's resources to help with that.
Speaker: But do you feel like, because culture is always changing and people are always changing.
Speaker: And so a lot of times the things we create are always changing.
Speaker: Because, well, how long have you been with God's Helping Hands?
Speaker: Oh, 17 years, something like that.
Speaker: So in that time, do you feel like
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: I'm thinking the writing of the pieces.
Speaker: Does the story structure change or the examples or situations you put the characters into?
Speaker: Do you ever feel like you have to examine and be like, how are things changing and what's an appropriate way to describe this for now?
Speaker: Well, yes, to a certain extent.
Speaker: We are always, if we're going to resurrect old material, we're always looking at it again.
Speaker: And the reason is because a lot of times, in short periods of time, it's the verbiage that changes.
Speaker: Sometimes just the vernacular.
Speaker: We're not talking about big stuff.
Speaker: We're talking about kids don't use that phrase anymore.
Speaker: They use this phrase.
Speaker: Now they use riz.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Or do they anymore.
Speaker: If they used it yesterday, they might not tomorrow.
Speaker: That's true.
Speaker: Now that we're all catching on to Riz, it's going to go out.
Speaker: Yeah, it's gone now.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But sometimes it gets a little bit bigger when you're talking about like writing styles.
Speaker: So God's Helping Hands has been a ministry that's been around since 1980.
Speaker: So this is over 40 years.
Speaker: When I look at some of the really old material that I didn't write that was being written when I was a kid, I notice kind of a big shift.
Speaker: And that is just in the format of how a sketch works or how a storyline works.
Speaker: You can see this if you just look at cartoons or sitcoms.
Speaker: Compare the difference between, let's say, we'll go really old here, I Love Lucy.
Speaker: Compare that with, fast forward into the 80s and 90s, The Cosby Show.
Speaker: Then change it again with The Office.
Speaker: These are three very different formats for storytelling.
Speaker: So you go from things that used a lot of very tight formulas,
Speaker: that had a lot of maybe puns.
Speaker: You see this a lot with like Hanna-Barbera cartoons.
Speaker: There's a lot of puns, a lot of slapstick, a lot of that kind of short little jokes that are happening in a series.
Speaker: It's just a series of joke writing.
Speaker: Then you move forward and you can follow this either.
Speaker: You follow cartoons, you follow sitcoms, you follow stand-up comedy shows this.
Speaker: where it went from joke telling to, and I do think it was Bill Cosby that really introduced the narrative joke, the storytelling.
Speaker: That was very relatable.
Speaker: That's lasted a long time.
Speaker: So yes, the forms change somewhat.
Speaker: We try some different forms sometimes.
Speaker: Sometimes we'll intentionally jump out of one format into another format just to grab the attention again.
Speaker: We'll talk with kids for an hour or two hours straight.
Speaker: And part of the secret of doing that is just changing the tempo sometimes.
Speaker: Sometimes you give them a piece of music.
Speaker: Then you change it up and you do a little story.
Speaker: Maybe you do a serial that has snippets that appear here.
Speaker: And then after a little while, there's the next piece.
Speaker: After a little while, there's the next piece.
Speaker: So you use that kind of thing.
Speaker: Sometimes we'll use a piece of poetry.
Speaker: One time we did a puppet sketch and we used the old and I'm talking ancient form of Greek theater.
Speaker: We had puppets doing Greek theater.
Speaker: And you know what?
Speaker: It was effective.
Speaker: I wouldn't want to do it all the time, but that's why it was effective.
Speaker: We just threw it in as something to grab the attention.
Speaker: And all throughout that, and here we're looping again, looping back to that through thread, you don't have to change the message.
Speaker: Truth, truth things, absolutes, they don't change.
Speaker: When children are born, they're born the same as children have been born ever since children have been born.
Speaker: They come with a certain set of needs because they are people, because they are humans.
Speaker: And so they come with the same needs that every human being has ever come into.
Speaker: And the answer...
Speaker: for every need has been provided in Jesus Christ.
Speaker: So we're just wrapping it up in different decoration, but the core is never changing.
Speaker: Awesome.
Speaker: Cool.
Speaker: I want to shift a little bit to kind of your story as an artist and kind of just where you've gotten to now working with God's Helping Hands and obviously doing a lot of other artistic stuff on the side.
Speaker: But what first got you into performing and...
Speaker: acting and singing and music and art and all of that.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: I started publicly singing when I was three.
Speaker: So that was the first thing.
Speaker: Singing was first and I was three years old.
Speaker: And when you start at three, you just never know to be afraid.
Speaker: So I kind of skipped the stage fright thing for the most part.
Speaker: Then when I was six, I started learning the piano.
Speaker: I liked the piano.
Speaker: I learned real quick that I hated practicing the piano.
Speaker: But I had a tough mother who had tough love for me.
Speaker: And she told me when I was still a little boy and she got sick of my complaining, she said, listen, you are going to practice and you're going to take lessons until you're 20.
Speaker: And then we'll talk about it.
Speaker: And she meant it.
Speaker: That's exactly what happened.
Speaker: Let's see, moving forward.
Speaker: When I was eight or nine, I joined a choir of kids that also did some small drama along the side and did that on the radio.
Speaker: The program was called the Children's Bible Hour Radio Program, and it was out of Grand Rapids.
Speaker: The ministry still exists in a very different form now, and it's shifted, its names changed, and it's now known as Keys for Kids Ministries.
Speaker: Still out of Grand Rapids.
Speaker: But in those years, it was radio programs that were being produced every week and were on 600 and some radio stations around the world.
Speaker: Then when I got out of those kid years and I started getting my feet wet a little bit more in theater things.
Speaker: um just community theater stuff i auditioned for my first community theater uh play when i was in my early teens and did not get a part uh they were looking for something else um but i tried again something else and and got involved with community theater did several shows over the years um
Speaker: And and then over time, you know, now we're where are we?
Speaker: Oh, we're in my early 20s now, I guess.
Speaker: The Lord was doing different things with me.
Speaker: I was experiencing new things with music, trying different things, being serving in different ways, working in different ways with music primarily.
Speaker: And then I met my wife and we got married.
Speaker: She grew up in this ministry, God's Helping Hands, because her grandparents started it.
Speaker: Her parents were part of it almost from the very beginning.
Speaker: She grew up doing work.
Speaker: what we're doing now, and didn't think she was going to be doing it for life.
Speaker: When she and I met, we had different stuff we were doing.
Speaker: We were in a different line of work altogether.
Speaker: I was working for a small Bible institute.
Speaker: I was teaching.
Speaker: And the Lord, through a very unusual and surprising set of circumstances, sent us back to God's helping hands.
Speaker: And that was 17, 18 years ago.
Speaker: So there it is in a really small nutshell.
Speaker: Yeah, cool.
Speaker: Hey friends, I just wanted to take a second and give you an update on Godspell.
Speaker: So last year we ended up raising $4,600, which is incredible.
Speaker: That is a hundred more than a third of our funding, which was our goal for last year.
Speaker: So that is incredible.
Speaker: We've still got a ways to go though, two thirds.
Speaker: We've got about 9,000 left to raise.
Speaker: So
Speaker: If you are interested in helping us out, we're selling some ads in our program.
Speaker: So if you know any businesses that would be interested in buying an ad, feel free to send them over to us.
Speaker: You can find an email to contact us on our website or some more information about that there.
Speaker: Or if you still want to give and donate, you wanted to last year but just weren't able to,
Speaker: Again, you can find all that information on our website, artists of the way.com.
Speaker: We have a whole Godspell tab.
Speaker: We have audition information posted.
Speaker: We have all the information about our fundraising there.
Speaker: So feel free to check that out.
Speaker: If you know a business that wants to buy an ad, I'd love to get connected with them.
Speaker: And any help that you want to give is appreciated and all the help that you have
Speaker: given so far is appreciated.
Speaker: This has exceeded my expectations.
Speaker: It's been tremendous.
Speaker: It's been really wonderful to see God bless it.
Speaker: And I truly believe he's going to get this to stage.
Speaker: I can't wait to see how he's going to do it.
Speaker: And I'm so blessed with the help that we've already received.
Speaker: So thank you all so much and enjoy the rest of the podcast.
Speaker: Cool.
Speaker: So I'm curious to unpack that story a little bit because you and I were talking a little bit off air before we started recording just about some of the similarities you and I have in
Speaker: like the sensibilities and callings God's kind of put on us where on the one hand, there's this really strong call towards the arts.
Speaker: And on the other hand, there's this ministry side of things and God is, you know, there's like an equal passion for both.
Speaker: And, um,
Speaker: There's a sense of them being disparate and a sense of not being sure how they can fit together.
Speaker: But at least in my life, God was always like, has always been like, he hasn't stopped doing this.
Speaker: Anytime I focus more on one or the other, he's always like,
Speaker: well, remember, you're an artist.
Speaker: I made you an artist.
Speaker: But then anytime I get too wrapped up in that, he's like, well, remember, I'm calling you to follow me.
Speaker: I'm calling you to do ministry.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I guess, what was some of your experience in trying to make sense of that yourself and trying to build something out of that yourself?
Speaker: And what did God end up doing out of that and reconciling that?
Speaker: Yeah, okay, so let's see.
Speaker: So I'm 20 years old, right?
Speaker: Or maybe 21, right in there.
Speaker: And I feel a little bit lost.
Speaker: I've trained for years in piano and voice with professionals.
Speaker: So I've got a really good foundation and training in that.
Speaker: I also trained on the organ.
Speaker: I don't use that much anymore, but I had.
Speaker: At the same time, I was a professional clown.
Speaker: Who also did ventriloquism professionally.
Speaker: I'd done it all over the place here in Michigan, but I'd also done it overseas in England and in South America.
Speaker: And I am unmarried.
Speaker: And I'm going, what is my life?
Speaker: I totally don't know what this is.
Speaker: Can anybody, where's the, I mean, and I hadn't gone to college and I'm thinking, what does one do with these things?
Speaker: Is there some degree for weirdos who do weird things well?
Speaker: And I'll tell you, I had a lot of really well-meaning people that really loved me and wanted the best for me who put a lot of pressure on me and on my folks for me to go and extend my education in a formal way at a college and get a degree.
Speaker: And I'm the oldest, so this is a new journey for my parents as well.
Speaker: And after a while, we kind of felt like we needed to buckle under that pressure.
Speaker: Well, maybe we should.
Speaker: I don't know what in the world it is I'm going to do at college, but maybe should I go and dig into music?
Speaker: The thing was, the professor that I was taking my music from or my voice from, he was teaching the college professors in Grand Rapids who taught voice.
Speaker: So if I did that, it would actually be going backwards.
Speaker: My piano teacher was a concert pianist who played.
Speaker: So, you know, something else.
Speaker: Well, long story short, John.
Speaker: We went to one of the schools in Grand Rapids and registered for classes, got it all set up, paid the, well, at that time was $100 non-refundable.
Speaker: I know it's not that now.
Speaker: We paid our $100 non-refundable to get the classes set up.
Speaker: And we got in the car and we were driving back because I was still living at home at the time.
Speaker: And I don't know who said it.
Speaker: Both my folks were there.
Speaker: One of the three of us said, something was not right there.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: What is it?
Speaker: What happened there?
Speaker: And we prayed on it, and we came to realize that what we had done, although on the face of it, nothing wrong with it, but what we had done is we had jumped ahead of the Lord.
Speaker: We'd gotten so nervous about what it was I was supposed to do that I lost sight of what it was I was doing.
Speaker: And my dad, he, and I lost a hundred dollars and I didn't go to school and, and I never did go to college and I never did get a degree.
Speaker: Uh, and you know what?
Speaker: That was okay.
Speaker: In fact, it was the best thing for my life.
Speaker: Now that I look back,
Speaker: And of course, hindsight is 20-20.
Speaker: We look back and I look at what happened in the years that I would have been at a school and see what the Lord did.
Speaker: It was absolutely 100% life-changing and formative for what the Lord actually had lined up for me.
Speaker: But I didn't know it.
Speaker: So how do you discover what it is that the Lord wants you to do?
Speaker: Well, my dad gave me a really good piece of advice because he got kind of sick of me whining about, I don't know what to do.
Speaker: I don't know what I'm supposed to do with my life.
Speaker: He said, son, stop looking for God to open a door and start walking through the ones that are already open.
Speaker: Oh, well, that's kind of an easier thing to walk through ones that are already open.
Speaker: So I started walking through doors that were already open and I'd keep walking until it was closed.
Speaker: Not that door.
Speaker: I'll walk through this door.
Speaker: And what that did was it put my focus off of myself and number one, onto the Lord.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And then number two, on to the world around me and the needs around me.
Speaker: So when the Lord took my focus off of myself and put it on himself and on what he had for me to do just inside one day, then he began to reveal the next thing and the next thing.
Speaker: I'm going to tell you, John, never in my life would I have ever dreamt up
Speaker: that my work for the last nearly 20 years now would be to reach boys and girls with the gospel using puppets.
Speaker: What?
Speaker: What?
Speaker: Now, I still use the other things.
Speaker: I use the music and the training I had and all of that stuff.
Speaker: I still get to use it.
Speaker: And the Bible training that I got, which I didn't even talk about, there was a whole set of that in there too.
Speaker: But all those things were preparatory.
Speaker: I just didn't know for what.
Speaker: But God did.
Speaker: And when I put my focus on serving him today, and another thing was this, I had to stop looking for the big thing.
Speaker: Because I had this in my mind as a young man that, okay, whatever I'm doing now is the small thing.
Speaker: And eventually, all of a sudden, there's going to be this big thing.
Speaker: It's going to be big and huge.
Speaker: It's going to be the thing.
Speaker: It's going to have flashing lights on it that says, Chris's career.
Speaker: And God's going to be standing behind it, holding it like a cheerleader going, this is it, Chris.
Speaker: This is the big thing I have for you.
Speaker: Isn't it great?
Speaker: He never did that.
Speaker: There wasn't a sign.
Speaker: There was just him.
Speaker: And when I started looking at just him, then he started putting the pieces into place.
Speaker: That was the same thing, by the way, that was true when it came to me getting married.
Speaker: I didn't get married until I was 25.
Speaker: And 25 now is young.
Speaker: But when you're 23, you're like, life has passed me by.
Speaker: I'm never getting married.
Speaker: And I had to stop looking for it.
Speaker: It was not until I stopped looking for someone to spend the rest of my life with that the Lord sent my wife and sent us together.
Speaker: Totally unexpectedly, but there it was.
Speaker: And it's been that way ever since.
Speaker: I have had to learn, and it's not a lesson you learn once.
Speaker: You learn it over and over and over to let go of the future and grab on to the present and serve the Lord in that.
Speaker: There you go.
Speaker: That's a little bit of it.
Speaker: That's awesome.
Speaker: That definitely rings true in my life.
Speaker: I was originally going to go into film and then God was like, no, you like theater more, don't you, John?
Speaker: I was like, oh, darn, you're right.
Speaker: So what do I do now?
Speaker: Well, you do Bible school.
Speaker: Oh, that tracks.
Speaker: And so, and it just feels like every like amazing thing has always happened when I've let go of what I thought the amazing thing was going to be and put my eyes on God.
Speaker: And I don't know how that might be a personality thing of like you and me and not necessarily artists in general.
Speaker: But I I do.
Speaker: I think it's people in general.
Speaker: I think it's everybody.
Speaker: And I'll tell you why.
Speaker: Here's a verse of scripture that the Lord kind of burned into my head.
Speaker: It's Psalm 1611.
Speaker: It says, you will show me the path of life.
Speaker: In your presence is fullness of joy.
Speaker: At your right hand, which is the strong hand, you know, at your right hand, there are pleasures forevermore.
Speaker: And that word forevermore, the actual meaning of that word in the Hebrew means to the end of my journey.
Speaker: So all of that going to the end of my journey where there are pleasures forevermore is predicated.
Speaker: Right there it is in the scripture of you showing me the path of life.
Speaker: Your presence is fullness of joy.
Speaker: It reminds me of the psalm that begins with, delight yourself also in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart.
Speaker: Boy, I used to think that meant if I'm happy in the Lord, he's going to give me what I want.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: It doesn't mean that at all.
Speaker: It means if I'm focused on the Lord, he gives me his desire.
Speaker: Delight yourself also in the Lord.
Speaker: He gives you the desires of your heart.
Speaker: And then it goes on, commit your way to the Lord and he will bring it to pass.
Speaker: It's all about him.
Speaker: And that's, I know for me, that's often a struggle and it's a struggle to find the balance because as an artist,
Speaker: A, partly because of necessity, you're constantly reevaluating what you're doing because you shouldn't not, or it'll just decline in quality.
Speaker: And you'll be like, it's great.
Speaker: I haven't looked at it though, because I'm just looking at God.
Speaker: So, but there's also the responsibility in there too, isn't there?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: But there's also the struggle of like,
Speaker: It's so easy to get caught up in the thing.
Speaker: And I'm working on Godspell now, which is the gospel.
Speaker: So if there's anything I should be focused on in that show, it's Jesus.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: There's been so many times where I've gotten bogged down in like so many other things because I'm looking at the work.
Speaker: And so I feel like...
Speaker: But then like the stress increases.
Speaker: And I think if we can learn, and like you said, it's a lesson to constantly relearn.
Speaker: And I always am relearning it.
Speaker: But to keep God as the center and keep your eyes fixed on him.
Speaker: It's like Peter and the waves.
Speaker: Like if you keep it fixed on him, he's going to walk you through it.
Speaker: even if things are hard, but he's going to, he's going to make everything happen and you're just going to be his instrument and not that you won't do anything.
Speaker: And things are hard.
Speaker: Well, and let's not kid ourselves.
Speaker: As, as, as performers, you and I understand that when you're actually doing the performance, oh, that's the fun stuff, right?
Speaker: That's, oh, oh, Ned, the audience is there and they're enjoying it or they're, or maybe they're crying.
Speaker: Well, if you meant it to be that way, then yay, hooray.
Speaker: You know, whatever it is, that's the payoff.
Speaker: But man, I'll speak just for myself.
Speaker: When I am working on the underside or the inside of a great big 38-foot Greyhound bus, because that's what we use to travel in in the summertime, and I have no mechanical skill, I don't have any... When I'm doing stuff like this,
Speaker: There's no audience there.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Or when we're working on, maybe my wife is building a new puppet and she is struggling with the design and the material is not dying correctly.
Speaker: And then the sewing machine is not working like it's supposed to.
Speaker: This does not feel like ministry.
Speaker: This just feels like work and drudgery and like you're on a hamster wheel.
Speaker: All of that stuff is real.
Speaker: This idea that, and you can apply this to any profession, there's this little layer of top that people see.
Speaker: And then there's everything underneath.
Speaker: And that everything underneath is not always fun.
Speaker: In fact, it usually isn't.
Speaker: And I know that, you know, right now we're talking to people who are interested in art.
Speaker: That's this podcast.
Speaker: These are artists.
Speaker: Boy, oh boy.
Speaker: That's drudgery underneath.
Speaker: But the Lord can still be in that too.
Speaker: There's value in the struggle.
Speaker: And nobody has to know about it, and they may never know about it.
Speaker: But the Lord knows about it.
Speaker: He cares about it.
Speaker: That effort is important to him.
Speaker: Well, that's, and it's refining too.
Speaker: It's refining for you and it's refining for the art.
Speaker: I can't remember the whole verse, but it's, it's through that like pressure that you're refined like gold.
Speaker: I can't remember if that's.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: The refiner's fire.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I mean, that's, that's all art.
Speaker: I know as a writer, like if you're.
Speaker: Anything that you write, it's a struggle to write that because it's a constant push-pull between the different things that you're chasing in the piece, whether it's a long thing or a short thing, and it's constantly being refined.
Speaker: And then you show it to somebody and they're like, that doesn't make any sense.
Speaker: And you're like, you're right.
Speaker: And then that struggle refines it even more.
Speaker: And then that can extend to our life too.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Cool.
Speaker: I want to ask, just because I'm curious, what's it like performing with puppets?
Speaker: Because I'm, you know, an actor.
Speaker: I was hoping you would ask that.
Speaker: I didn't know what you were going to ask, but I did think you might ask that, which is a great question.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: So let's speak in artist terms here for a minute.
Speaker: When we're acting, like on the stage, we...
Speaker: rules or practices that we try to adhere to in order to do the thing that we're doing.
Speaker: It always starts with a thought, right?
Speaker: We're always thinking something first and then the expression comes.
Speaker: Yes, there are lines on a page, whatever, that's just so everyone can stay together in the same moment, you know, but then there's all the expression.
Speaker: There's all the voice expression, but boy, when you are stage acting,
Speaker: The face is so important.
Speaker: Of course, unless it's Greek theater and then they hid their face and then they had their voice left.
Speaker: You know, puppetry is a lot like that.
Speaker: So here you've got a puppet.
Speaker: It does not have any life of its own.
Speaker: It is just laying there.
Speaker: And by the way, a puppet that's just laying there, I don't even like to look at.
Speaker: They're creepy looking, man.
Speaker: They're dead.
Speaker: They're dead.
Speaker: They're just laying there looking all dead.
Speaker: But then when you have someone, and I'll talk about my wife.
Speaker: I have a whole team and they're all good at this.
Speaker: My wife has done this her whole life and she's the best I've seen.
Speaker: When she picks one up and puts it on and gives it a voice, and she puts it, and a lot of our work, when we're working live, it's different when we're working with film.
Speaker: But when we're working live, we're working on our knees.
Speaker: So we're down on our knees behind some scenery, and it's just from our elbow up, and you don't see any of that.
Speaker: That's the puppet.
Speaker: And their arms are being controlled often with little wires that we are controlling with our other hand.
Speaker: No one can see our face.
Speaker: So how do we do everything that an actor has to do?
Speaker: That puppet has to do all of it.
Speaker: That puppet has to think the thought first.
Speaker: That puppet has to deliver whatever the line is with the correct inflection, with all the thought that's behind it.
Speaker: And they have to do it with expression.
Speaker: Facial expression.
Speaker: But their faces, unless we're working with a particularly complicated one, most of them, their eyes don't move in their heads, their mouths open and shut.
Speaker: But you know what?
Speaker: When you have a skilled puppeteer, and sometimes some of the better Muppet performers are really good.
Speaker: Frank Oz was amazing at this.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: They can create expressions that you understand when the eyes don't even move.
Speaker: And it's all coming up your arm and into your fingers.
Speaker: And it's tiny little micro movements that happen.
Speaker: And it's like a magic trick.
Speaker: It really is.
Speaker: It's a fascinating thing.
Speaker: We'll do sketches where I'll be actually just myself.
Speaker: I don't have a puppet or anything.
Speaker: I'm standing out with the audience, and I'm interacting with one of the puppets.
Speaker: I know full well it's a puppet.
Speaker: In fact, I know more than the rest of the audience because I'm standing in a position where I can look down into the stage.
Speaker: I can see, oh, look, there's my wife.
Speaker: She has got the... And I forget...
Speaker: That puppet is my wife doing that because she's so good at making it so real.
Speaker: All the acting stuff has to happen with a puppet.
Speaker: And it is a discipline.
Speaker: It's its own thing.
Speaker: When you're puppeting from behind the set or the stage, can you see the puppet at all?
Speaker: Or do you just have to kind of know your stuff and know that this movement will produce this angle and give this feel?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Well, it's both because, yes, you can see them.
Speaker: Most of the time you can see them in some situations.
Speaker: You can't most of the time you can see them.
Speaker: And and the main reason that I will look up when possible is to make sure I'm maintaining the eyeline between my puppet and another puppet.
Speaker: Mm hmm.
Speaker: You have to maintain that eyeline, even if you're cheating out, which you sometimes have to do with puppetry also.
Speaker: But you still have to maintain the cheating out eyeline.
Speaker: You have to know that the thing that you are referencing is the thing that the puppet's actually looking at.
Speaker: When we're interacting with boys and girls, we usually, if we're behind the stage, we usually can't see them, but we can hear them.
Speaker: And we have to learn to get really accurate that when we hear a sound, a voice of a child out of 100 children in front of us, that that puppet, we can direct our hand to look directly at that child without being able to see them.
Speaker: When you can do that, boy, it just ramps up the suspension of disbelief to a whole new level, which is great.
Speaker: Children, by the way, they're very smart.
Speaker: Children are not fooled into thinking they're actually real, but they are willing to enter into this world.
Speaker: And when they do...
Speaker: It is so cool because then you can deliver a true message and they accept it into real life, even though we entered into this other realm.
Speaker: Here's a fun fact.
Speaker: A bunch of years ago, I just for fun, I just Googled television shows that use puppetry and this whole big list came up.
Speaker: Do you know something?
Speaker: Most of the shows on that list were not children's shows.
Speaker: As a matter of fact, most of them were not shows children should watch.
Speaker: As a matter of fact, a lot of them were shows that I will not watch.
Speaker: It taught me something fascinating, and that is that puppetry is a fantastic, fascinating, and really old medium.
Speaker: It's something about it.
Speaker: is it gives the ability to get a foot in the door for whatever message it is that you're trying to convey.
Speaker: The world figured this out long, long ago.
Speaker: And we have seen many iterations of this.
Speaker: And it's all types of different puppetry too.
Speaker: There's stage puppetry.
Speaker: There's ventriloquism as a form of puppetry.
Speaker: There's the kind of puppetry you see in a big stage show like the Lion King.
Speaker: There's marionettes and shadow puppets and all this stuff.
Speaker: This is all, these are all different forms of puppetry, but they're all doing one thing.
Speaker: They are conveying a message through a unique medium.
Speaker: That's awesome.
Speaker: Cool.
Speaker: Well, we are getting close to our time here.
Speaker: Thank you for coming on.
Speaker: This has been really fun.
Speaker: Oh, what fun.
Speaker: What a pleasure.
Speaker: Thank you very much.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I want to ask, before we let you go, are there any resources that you would direct people to if they are interested in growing as an artist or growing as a believer?
Speaker: Or maybe if they're interested in puppetry or ventriloquism?
Speaker: Yeah, sure.
Speaker: And exploring some of that.
Speaker: Well, I know it's going to sound cliched, but there's nothing cliched about it.
Speaker: You can do no better thing for yourself than to look into the Word of God every single day.
Speaker: The Word of God is there to teach us everything that we need to know about how to live and how to know God.
Speaker: And when you have that, everything else is secondary.
Speaker: When you have the Lord, everything else falls into place.
Speaker: It doesn't always feel like it, but he knows it does.
Speaker: Outside of that, get involved with some theater opportunities.
Speaker: And you may find that you're terrible at it.
Speaker: And don't be discouraged.
Speaker: Not everybody has the same gift.
Speaker: Thank goodness for that.
Speaker: What would the world be like if everyone was like me, a ventriloquist with a dummy on his hand, talking to himself all the time?
Speaker: That would be a very strange world.
Speaker: You don't want that.
Speaker: We need all the different parts and pieces.
Speaker: Just at God's Helping Hands, it's a small organization, but we need all these different parts and pieces, people to do the behind-the-scenes thing.
Speaker: This is true of every part of life.
Speaker: And by the way, every vocation can be ministry.
Speaker: That is not a separate category unto itself.
Speaker: There are those of us who are in vocational ministry.
Speaker: That's our day job.
Speaker: But every vocation can be done in ministry mindset and should be when you know the Lord Jesus.
Speaker: And I guess I will direct you to our website, just if you want to know a little bit more about us.
Speaker: It's g-h-h-i-n-c dot org.
Speaker: It stands for God's Helping Hands Incorporated dot org.
Speaker: And there's some different things on there.
Speaker: If you were to go to the listen, watch tab, there's some resources there.
Speaker: One is our weekly audio podcast for kids called off hand with Steven and Lydia.
Speaker: And, uh, that podcast is somewhere past its 600th episode.
Speaker: Uh, so that's, that's a really big, fun resource.
Speaker: That's it.
Speaker: It's, it's been, well, it's been a long time in the making, uh,
Speaker: There's a smaller but still growing resource called Adventures with Stephen and Lydia, two of our puppet characters, and those are videos.
Speaker: They can also be found, some of them, on our YouTube channel, which is a smaller channel, but I'll tell you what it is.
Speaker: It's at G-H-H.
Speaker: I believe is the YouTube channel.
Speaker: No, it's G H H I N C. There we go.
Speaker: That's the YouTube channel.
Speaker: And there's just a few things there.
Speaker: Most things are on our website.
Speaker: And then if you want to know what the face behind this voice looks like, there's a resource on that.
Speaker: Listen, watch tab on our website.
Speaker: Uh, that's called, um, a piece of really good news with, as I'm termed uncle Chris.
Speaker: So there you go.
Speaker: There's a few little resources from us.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: Awesome.
Speaker: Cool.
Speaker: Thanks for coming on, Chris.
Speaker: I really appreciate it.
Speaker: It's great to talk to you again.
Speaker: A pleasure, John.
