06/01/2026
Pastor Deb opened yesterday with a confession: she really doesn’t like The Wizard of Oz. Not the story, not the feeling it gives her. Something about it has always sat wrong, and she finally put her finger on it:
It’s the searching. The desperate, aching, heel-clicking searching for the thing that will finally make you whole. She’s felt that same energy in late-night bars, in the culture around her, in herself.
The story we keep telling each other: that we are defective, incomplete, far from 🏠 , and that somewhere out there is a 🧙♂️ behind a curtain who can fix us - if we just follow the yellow brick road.
But then she opened Genesis, our origin story, and it feels nothing like that.
It feels like soft earth. Like a long green growing season. It feels like home.
A God of pure goodness, unfolding creation from imagination and love, stepping back to look at what was made and calling it good.
Not conditionally good. Not good enough. Good. And that word, spoken by God, doesn’t just describe the world. It creates it. It creates a living truth that all creation carries: that we were made from goodness, by goodness, for goodness.
That’s the clarity Pastor Deb brought to the Great Commission yesterday. The invitation Jesus extends isn’t to join a club or recite a password. It’s to remember. To come back to what is already true:
We were made from goodness and goodness was made into us. Home isn’t a place we find at the end of the road. It lives inside us, the way God always has.
When we forget that, when the world convinces us we are broken and defective and lost, we can wander very far indeed. But the moment we remember what we are made of, we’re already home - no clicking of heels required.
