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(I wrote the following story a number of years ago, but it
seems appropriate to repost it at this time, considering the notable records
the new Star Wars movie, The Force Awakens has already
achieved. Hope you enjoy it!)
We can thank my mother-in-law for introducing Star Wars into our children’s lives by
getting our 5 year old son his first Star
Wars LEGO set. He ripped the boxes open and within seconds
our home was invaded by the Imperial Stormtroopers and the Droids.
I was mortified.
Star Wars?!!! He is
waaay too young for Star Wars!
It wasn’t the complexity of the building process I was
concerned about, because that never seemed to be a problem for our pint-size
engineer. What bothered me much more was a matter of introducing complex adult
issues into his immature mind, and the challenge that creates for me as his
parent. But, like it or not, the door was open and there was no going
back. From that day on, my son turned into a miniature StarWars-maniac. So far, he’s been
mostly preoccupied with recreating cosmic wars against his little sister. Along
the way he somehow acquired a prodigious amount of information about the
characters and the plot and various twists and turns in the storyline. He
learned the difference between the Imperial and the Rebel blaster, the who’s
who and what’s what of the Imperial Army and the Rebel Alliance, and all the
whys and therefores of the narrative that molded the worldview of generation
after generation since the first movie was released. He bought a Star Wars Visual Dictionary with his own
money(!) that looks more like Encyclopedia Britannica to me.
Now, all this wouldn’t be so surprising if it wasn’t until
this afternoon, years after the initial encounter, that he saw his very first Star Wars movie. Episode IV,
to be more precise, which I picked up from our local library.
Watching him watch the movie was as much (or more) fun as watching the movie
itself. It was as if he had all these loose pieces of a puzzle, and
he finally saw how they all fit together, he could finally place them in their
exact spots in the larger, 4-D story-puzzle. His delight was quite
contagious. During dinner, he continued chatting enthusiastically about all the
fascinating trivia he picked up during the afternoon Star Wars extravaganza. In the course of the
conversation, my husband casually mentioned George Lucas and what his intent
might have been for the unfolding of the various episodes in a certain
sequence.
George… Lucas?!! Our
son muttered hesitantly… And who is
this George Lucas? There was no doubt that he was utterly
confused. You could tell that he was scrolling down the imaginary
database of Star Wars names and
faces, from Emperor Palpatine through Chewbacca and Ewoks, but there was no
suitable match for the name “George Lucas”.
It was now our turn to be confused. How is it possible that
with all these years of borderline obsession with the Jedi and their pecking
order, Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader, R2D2 and Obi-Wan Kenobi, our son never
ever heard the name George Lucas? We looked at each other and burst
into laughter.
Hmmm...George
Lucas…. George Lucas…. Well, he is kind of like God to the world of
Star Wars. Without him, there would be no Star Wars, nor the galaxy, nor anybody
or anything else belonging to this galaxy far, far away. He created it
all. This amazing world exists because it first existed in the mind of
George Lucas.
It took several minutes for the news to settle in his
shaken-to-the core 9 year old mind screaming for a paradigm shift. Until this
moment of revelation he was so preoccupied with the fascinating universe which
George Lucas had created that for a brief while he simply couldn’t contain the
information about the existence of the creator of that universe.
There…there is a
George Lucas… there IS a George Lucas and I never even knew it!
In the beginning, God
created the heavens and the earth. Genesis
1:1
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