Blog 1951 – 01.27.2021

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz – Chapter 11

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rUPJrMRKmsGNxc1KyjN1jyYJRscaNV8Y/view?usp=drivesdk

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz – Chapter 11

The rescue and restoration of her friends to their former selves took several days and a lot of help from the freed and grateful Winkies, but it so thrilled Dorothy’s heart to have her intelligent, loving, and courage trio back at her side. The Scarecrow, the Tin Woodsman, and the Lion bore a striking resemblance to some fellows she knew on Uncle Henry and Aunt Em’s farm back in Kansas but the longer she stayed in the land of Oz the more Kansas seemed the dream. But, then I have long thought the little children’s round, Row, Row, Row Your Boat’s ending line quite profound, “Life is but a dream.” If that be so, let us dream on, Pilgrims.

Dorothy’s dream is rapidly coming to an end, let us enjoy hers even as we do our own. I have heard it speculated that some dream in color and some do not. In the movie, Kansas in the beginning is a rather colorless place, but the Kansas Dorothy awakes to is every bit as technicolor as Oz and Dorothy finds to her surprise that even her Oz had been peopled by those she knew and loved in Kansas too.

In C.S. Lewis’s stories of children traveling to and from the wonderful land called Narnia, the Lion King Asian tells each of the two brothers and two sisters of the original travelers that after a certain age they will no longer be traveling back to Narnia. Lucy, the youngest girl and the first of the four to discover Narnia through the magical Wardrobe, is saddened by this announcement till Asian assures her that it is time she learned him by a different name in her own world and that he always had been and would always be with her wherever she went.

I have shared the great comfort that it was to me when a song that I had learned in church as a boy came back to me as I flew to South Vietnam in early 1970, a very scared nineteen year old soldier clad in new olive drab jungle fatigues, words that like Aslan’s to little Lucy buoyed my aching breaking heart:

“Whether I live or die

Whether I wake or sleep

Whether upon the land

Or on the storming deep.

I shall not be afraid,

For I am the Lord’s I know.”

What a comfort it is, wherever we go, whatever we do, whom ever we meet, to know Who and Whose we truly are. Tomorrow the gang is off to see the Wizard again and so are we.

Your friend and fellow traveler,

David White

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1uIBN6KC4u0Ocj3IW1HqxvStytcMo90D4/view?usp=drivesdk

I’m Not Who I Was