Kids

Man, are we glad this one is over.  The show ended up going really well, but the process to get there almost killed us. Dead. Seriously…dead.  I’ll try to explain it to you, but let me warn you, it’s a perfect storm and you might want to throw back some Advil before reading.  Okay, so first, we had to do the Easter story.  The show landed on the Sunday before Easter and we knew our parents would be expecting a KidStuf Easter show, plus UpStreet really wanted to tell it because kids were joining their parents Easter Sunday so this was their one chance to do Easter UpStreet-style as well.  So we knew “we’re doing Easter.” And then we found out the Big Idea was Conviction. Now tying those two things together was going to be tricky because when you tell the Easter story, you don’t really want to focus on how Jesus stuck to his conviction, you want to talk about salvation, but we needed to make it work.

Then add to THAT, we wanted to change the definition which was: “Standing for what’s right even when others don’t” because we didn’t like the word “right.” We thought it left the door open for people to define “right” as right for each individual instead of what God says is right.  So we decided to go with the straight up dictionary definition: “An unshakable belief,” thinking that it’d be so empowering to tell our families to be unshakable.  But we didn’t land on that definition until super late in the game and the UpStreet curriculum team (being so organized and far ahead) had already used a lot of “standing up” terminology in their planning…so we had to at least nod to “standing up” as an analogy.  You see how we got messed up?  One show has to tie in: Easter, salvation, conviction, being unshakable and standing up all in 30 minutes.  Oh, and be funny too! Oh, and make sure that families can apply this all month long in our Take-Out.  Simple, right?

Well as you can imagine, there were several all day creative meetings that ended in deadlock.  We tried everything we could think of to link it together and nothing worked.   It wasn’t until the final hour, the morning of the day where us writers had sworn to each other that we would walk in and decide something, anything and just go with it. It was that morning that my husband (one of our singers) came up with the idea of Weebles. You know those toys from the 70’s that sing: “Weebles wobble but they don’t fall down?” Well believe it or not, that totally unlocked our creativity and we were able to build an entire show and Take-Out around Weebles.

We had life size ones for each character in the show and they used them to illustrate all the people in the Easter story who were too “wobbly” to stand up for their convictions. We talked about how it’s what you stand ON that makes you able to stand UP and be unshakable. The story of Easter showed us that when you stand ON Jesus, you will never be shaken because Psalms 62:2 tells us that He alone is our rock and our salvation, and when we’re scared, He’s our fortress of protection, and so we don’t have to be shaken.  Yeah, you might still get scared, or a little wobbly sometimes, but if you stand on Jesus, and do what He tells you is right, “You might wobble, but you’ll never fall down!”  And wouldn’t you know it, we did the show and it actually worked.  People loved it and went home with our Conviction Crossing board game and to make their own Easter egg Weeble playing pieces and it all came together happier than an episode of Full House. PTL it’s over. On to May we go!!!

Post written by:  Holly - KidStuf