I absolutely love the smell of potpourri and I really love the aroma of cinnamon pine cones that usually pop up during Christmas. I hope that today’s object lesson will be of use to youth ministries, home devotionals and family home evenings. Today’s lesson touches upon the usefulness of working on a project as a team rather than doing something alone.

There are many projects that work just great being done by one person, but where there is a big or complex project it is often easier to distribute the work load among several people than just to do it alone. The additional advantage is that a big task that is shared can often be accomplished in a shorter period of time. Also with many people, different people have different skills sets and you can take advantage of the combined knowledgebase of many people. If something is too heavy for one person, it can often be lifted by many instead. Also distributing the work load can help prevent one particular person from over work or exhaustion.

Object lesson: open a new package of potpourri and start piling like items together in separate piles. Sniff and identify the similar items and discuss the advantages to the aroma of those standalone items. Now combine them again and just brainstorm as a family or class on the possible ways of how many people can contribute to the success of a project. If you have a past activity or event that a team has worked on, than refer to that project and give specific examples of how each member of the team contributed to the success of the whole.