Wizard of Oz always was a favorite movie of mine, but it always bothered me at
the end when Glenda told Dorothy she had what she needed to leave Oz all
along…the ruby slippers.
Glenda do that to Dorothy? Just think of all Dorothy could have avoided…the
scary monkeys, the long journey, etc.
Dorothy those shoes are your one-way ticket out of here? Would
Dorothy have stayed? Would she have stopped to help a brainless scarecrow, a
heartless tin man and the cowardly lion? Probably not. Would she have made a
choice that put her on a road to hardship, persecution, and danger even though
she knew that she would save others and grow personally along the way? And if Dorothy
had returned straight to Kansas, what was the point of the journey?
through those hard places to become the Dorothy she should be. By taking that hard road she made some wonderful friends, and those difficult experiences made her grow personally.
would have been forever looking for that place “over the rainbow” and avoiding
her fears. But by going there, by
preserving, she learned that “somewhere over the rainbow” wasn’t a perfect place to escape from your problems. It was a place of growth.
are other books like The Wizard of Oz with epic journeys, and in each one the
protagonist returns a changed individual. In these books the “hero’s journey” is quite literal and we see it is through trials and tests that the characters bloom and grow.
these books remind me of Job 23:10
take: when He hath tried me, I shall come forth as gold.
easy to make beloved characters suffer, we can take a cue from these journeys as well as from the lessons in the book of Job– it isn’t the good times forge character, it’s the trials.