The Man Behind The Curtain

There is thunder and lighting in the palace, smoke billows in great clouds and the huge voice of The Wizard of Oz threatens Dorothy and her friends - until Toto pulls aside a drape and reveals the wizard as a fraud. Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain! the veteran actor Frank Morgan exclaims in a last ditch effort to maintain the illusion, but it is too late. The great wizard has been exposed.

There are no current day wizards, no Professor Marvels, but I often think there is still a man behind the curtain, pulling strings and creating special effects for our everyday lives. He would be mostly kind, mostly a showman and something of a narcissist, but randomly he would decide to test us through a small series of disasters - for his own ends and perhaps for our own good, he would make life complicated and invent obstacle courses for us to overcome. There would be lessons about adversity and faith, about trusting in a power outside ourselves, about keeping on in the face of impossible odds and inescapable situations. There is value and virtue in learning the simple things, in remembering that at the end of the road not much of it will really matter anyway - staying in the now and putting one foot in front of the other, one step at a time, is what gets us through the hardship and the inherent unfairness. He would be stubbornly determined to teach us that giving up is no solution, it's just giving up.

If you've painted yourself in a corner, I once read, remember: paint dries. Hard to keep in mind when everything seems against you and there's no way out but the man behind the curtain may still be there and may still have a plan. It would be nice to know the details, of course, but then it wouldn't be faith.

So on we go, through debt and job loss and abscessed teeth, unplanned pregnancies and foul weather, too much month and not enough money, hard times and harder decisions, endless chores and child raising. I am always looking for the man behind the curtain so I can give him a piece of my mind.