Yellow Brick Road of Life

     Wizard of Oz holds a special place in my heart. When I was little, before my sister was born, this was the movie that I drove my parents crazy watching all the time. When I was 10 I played a munchkin in the high school play, and so did my sister. My mother and grandma were also the costume designers for the play. I can remember laying in bed and listening to them both sew the costumes at night. Also, just a year ago my other grandmother took me to see the play at Beef & Boards.

     When I came back home from my medical withdrawal of college I realized something... I am on a yellow brick road, and my yellow brick road has weeds.

     Everybody has a path to walk in life. Generally people believe that path should be easy. More often than not people outside of Christianity believe that we Christians have it so easy. That struggles or mistakes or even weeds are not part of our lives. We are all human- weeds happen.
     Let's think about this- how do weeds happen? Do we plant their seeds? I don't ever recall purposely planting weeds in my rose garden. I'll be darned though if they didn't pop out of the ground; every year, all summer long. I had to watch my roses everyday.
     That's the truth to Christianity. Just because I am following God does not mean that I will not run into some weeds. The only way to keep the weeds out of my garden are to constantly take care of it, and that's exactly what we are supposed to do in our relationship with Christ- take care of it.

     Think back on the Wizard of Oz movie... Before you accepted Christ was the world a little dull/full of sepia browns/no-color?  How did you feel afterwards? Was everything bright & new?
     Look at Dorothy's journey on the yellow brick road. When she first started following it she "circled" a couple of times before the road took off in a straight direction. Then, she came to a fork in the road. Two possible directions, how do you know which way to go? She found a friend who wanted to go the same way as her.
     Then they came across the apple trees. Something so seemingly innocent that she wanted. As the tree pointed out to Dorothy, though, he was a thing that she made an assumption of and took for granted. Moving further on to the poppy field... haven't we all been there on our faith walk? We get tired, and even though we can see our goal we can't look past the field we're in.

     The key is that no matter what the Wicked Witch threw at Dorothy she kept following her path. She wanted to get home. My ultimate goal is to get Home-Heaven. Weeds and troubles find us and can side track us, but we keep following our yellow brick road.