In the country of the Munchkins, in a quiet field at the edge of a great cornfield, a farmer made a scarecrow.
He stuffed a sack with straw to make a head. He painted a face on the sack, with two eyes, and a nose, and a mouth turned up at the corners, because he wanted his scarecrow to look friendly. He put a blue Munchkin coat on the body, and stuffed it with more straw. He set the scarecrow on a pole, in the middle of the cornfield, and went home.
The scarecrow stood on his pole. He could not move. He could not speak, exactly, though somewhere inside him something was beginning to think.
The crows came.
The crows were not afraid of him. They sat on his arms. They sat on his head. They ate the corn he was supposed to be guarding. They had opinions about him, which they shared with each other, in the loud direct way that crows have.
"He is no good," said one. "Not enough straw."
"He has the wrong face," said another. "Friendly faces do not scare anybody."
"He has nothing at all in his head," said the oldest crow. "I have looked. Nothing. Not even a thought. A bag of straw on a pole. That is all he is."
The Scarecrow listened. He could not help listening, because the crows were on his shoulders. He listened for a very long time. He listened all summer, and all autumn, and the words of the crows went into him in a way that words do, when you cannot turn away from them.
By the time Dorothy found him, the Scarecrow had decided that the crows were right. He had no brain. The crows had said so. The crows knew.
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PART II
Scarecrow
in which he joins a road
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When Dorothy lifted him down from the pole, the Scarecrow stretched his straw arms and thanked her very politely. He told her about himself, in well-chosen words, and explained that he had no brain, and that the only thing he wanted, more than anything in the world, was to find a wizard who could give him one.
Dorothy listened to him explain this, in his careful sentences, and she thought, but did not yet say, that the Scarecrow was speaking remarkably well for somebody with no brain.
He came with her down the yellow brick road.
The road was long. There were dangers. There was a deep ditch that the Cowardly Lion could not jump, and the Scarecrow looked at the trees nearby and said, "If we push that one over, it will make a bridge." So they pushed it over. It made a bridge.
There was a river they could not cross, and the Scarecrow looked at the water and said, "If we make a raft of these reeds, the river will carry us." So they made a raft. The river carried them.
There was a field of poppies that put everyone to sleep who walked through it, and Dorothy fell asleep, and Toto fell asleep, and the Lion fell asleep, and the Tin Man and the Scarecrow, who could not fall asleep at all, because they were not made of the kind of bodies that sleep, carried their friends out of the field.
Each time, the Scarecrow had thought of what to do.
Each time, when his friends thanked him, he said it was nothing. He said the Lion had really done the work. He said it had been an obvious solution and anyone would have seen it.
He did not believe he had thought of these things, because he had no brain. The crows had said so. The Scarecrow knew this about himself. He had known it for a long time.
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PART III
Scarecrow
in which a wizard gives a gift
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When at last they reached the Emerald City, and at last they got in to see the Wizard, after a great deal of trouble that the Scarecrow had mostly been the one to solve, the Scarecrow asked for a brain.
The Wizard, who as you know was not really a wizard at all but a small kind man from far away, looked at the Scarecrow for a long time.
He took out a paper, very carefully. He pinned it to a ribbon. He put it around the Scarecrow's neck.
"This," said the Wizard, "is a diploma. It says that you are a person of considerable intellectual attainment. The bearer of this paper has earned the right to be called wise. There. You have a brain now."
The Scarecrow felt it immediately. He felt smarter. He felt clearer. He felt, for the first time in his life, permitted to think.
He stood there with the diploma around his neck and felt how strange it was. Because nothing had changed, really. The Wizard had not put anything inside his head. The Wizard had not given him knowledge. The Wizard had only given him a piece of paper with words on it.
But the Scarecrow felt different anyway.
He thought about this for a long while. And what he came to understand was that he had been waiting for somebody to tell him he was allowed. The crows had told him he was not. He had believed the crows for a very long time, even after Dorothy had said otherwise, even after his own clever ideas had saved his friends over and over again on the long road.
It had taken a wizard, and a piece of paper, and a small ceremony, to tell the Scarecrow what Dorothy had been trying to tell him for weeks.
"Oh," said the Scarecrow, holding the paper carefully. "Oh, that is very inconvenient."
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PART IV
Scarecrow
in which a scarecrow becomes a king
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When Dorothy went home in her silver shoes, the Wizard left in his balloon, and the Emerald City needed someone to rule it. The people chose the Scarecrow.
This was either a great honour or a great trick, and the Scarecrow was not entirely sure which. But he said yes, because that is what you do when people ask you to take care of them.
He governed for many years. He governed well. He listened carefully. He asked questions when he did not know things, which was often, because nobody knows everything, even people with diplomas. He said "I am not sure, let us think about it together," more than any king before him. He said it so often that the people of Oz began to say it too, and that, the Scarecrow thought, was probably good for everyone.
He kept the diploma in his pocket all his life. He did not need it. He had never needed it. But on the days when he could still hear the crows, in some quiet corner of himself, he took the paper out and looked at it. The diploma was not his brain. His brain had been there the whole time, doing what brains do, while the Scarecrow told himself it was not.
The diploma was just the day he had agreed to stop arguing with it.
The Scarecrow grew very old, in the way scarecrows do, which is mostly by getting a little more patched and a little more lopsided each year. He never replaced the straw the farmer had stuffed him with on that first day in the cornfield.
On a summer afternoon, near the end of his governing, a child in the Emerald City asked him, "Are you the wisest scarecrow there ever was?"
The Scarecrow thought about this seriously. He always thought seriously about questions from children.
"I am not the wisest," he said. "But I am, perhaps, the one who took the longest to believe he had a brain at all. Which is its own sort of education."
The child did not entirely understand him. Children often did not entirely understand the Scarecrow. But they knew, the way children know, that he was kind, and that he listened, and that he was, whatever else he was, very much theirs.
A long time before the Scarecrow, Paul wrote a letter to a small church about who God chooses. Would you like to hear it?
A LETTER FROM PAUL
Paul once wrote that God does not choose the people the world calls wise. God chooses the ones who have been told they are foolish.
The Scarecrow had been told he was foolish for a very long time.
Who has been telling you that you are not enough?
The crows said the Scarecrow was foolish. He had no brain, they said. Nothing in his head. Not worth taking seriously.
Paul once wrote that God does not choose the people the world thinks are wise. God chooses the ones who have been told they are foolish, and uses them to show the supposedly clever ones what they have been missing.
The Scarecrow was the wisest member of his company. He saw what the others missed. He thought of what needed thinking. He could not see this about himself, because the crows had been louder than the truth for a very long time.
Sometimes the people the world has called foolish are the people the world most needs.
What have you been told you cannot do? What have you been doing all along?
1 CORINTHIANS 1:27
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· · ·
"He had no brain. The crows had said so. The crows knew."
My second-grade teacher told my mother I was slow. This was 1974. They put me in the slow reading group. I stayed there for four years. I believed her. I would have told you, until I was thirty years old, that I was not a smart person. I just was not. I started a business when I was thirty-three because my husband had lost his job and we had three kids. I ran that business for twenty-five years and we never missed a mortgage payment. I figured out things that bigger companies were paying consultants to figure out. I just did it. I did not think it counted. I thought I was just lucky. My oldest grandchild asked me last year if I was a smart grandma. I said yes. I am still surprised every time I say it. But it has gotten easier. The Scarecrow's diploma is the day somebody finally said it out loud. I had to wait a very long time for mine.
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, Maria, 58, El Paso
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there is another story about someone whose mind was steady, and whose heart was steady, and who never stopped trusting what he knew, even when the world told him he was wrong.
his name was Daniel.