Every aspect of "The Wizard of Oz" was micro-managed to perfection. This could have resulted in a disjointed final product, but instead, somehow, the movie turned out seamless. What's the movie about? It's about a girl from Kansas transported to an amazing land of fantasy on a quest to find her way back home. Hold up Rewind. The opening scenes are all about Dorothy's neighbor, Miss Gulch, who shows-up riding a bicycle, bearing a sheriff's order giving her the right to take away Dorothy's dog, Toto, to be destroyed. Then Dorothy is transported, not to a world of fantasy, but into the symbolic interpretation of her own life back in Kansas, where each major character in the Land of Oz sprang from Dorothy's unconscious mind. This is where we find "Miss Gulch" taken to her extreme as a most evil witch. Now this is all very interesting, and simple, but we want to notice the interplay of these characters as working through a puzzle in Dorothy's mind. The story is not about Dorothy trying to find her way home because Dorothy has never left home. She was knocked unconscious in her very own bedroom at the beginning, and at the end, we find her having not ventured a single inch from her bed. Her journey is about the transformation of placement, not merely one's return to it.

This autobiography recounts a twenty-year quest to experience an authentic faith in God. It wrestles conventional spirituality in ways previously unimagined, beginning with the biblical account of Jesus cursing a fig tree and the power this obscure image held in the author's mind. The quest spans college years at America's top evangelical college, his rejection of Christianity, a flight to Kodiak, hallucinogenic drugs, and a crazy motorcycle trip back to Alaska during the winter. There he meets a seventeen year old hippie girl reading Zelda Fitzgerald and they wonder together if they can fall in love like Zelda and Scott and beat madness. After an unlikely two-year courtship, they marry, and become Baptist Christians. They then return to "the lower 48," jumping full force into the Nashville music industry, and experience the break-up of a twelve-year marriage as all goes bust -- and finally, a revisiting from the curse of the fig tree story with fresh meaning and a hidden revelation.