Plans

Uh-oh, I may have made a mistake. Last week I referenced Star Wars in my article… now that seems to be all I can think about, so you may be locked into a series of Star Wars related articles for the next little while… if they get old, let me know. I will try to eliminate as much geek-speak as possible, but for those of you that know me well, that is pretty difficult!

Anyway, I was thinking about one of the main characters from the movies, Luke. Now Luke goes through quite the adventure and changes drastically from the first movie (okay, I know technically it’s the “fourth”, but I’ll be referring to them in order of production) to the third. I’d like to take a minute to focus in on young Luke.

If you recall, in the first scene that has Luke in it, he is portrayed as a whiney teenager. Let’s not even get onto the topic of how despite how the media portrays them, not all teenagers are whiney all of the time, as that is its own can of worms. Instead I would like to talk about the way that Luke views his world.

A fan of the series will remember that Luke is anxious to leave his hometown to go to the Imperial Flight School, to join his friends. He is not happy with his place in the universe, he is far outside of the normally travelled area of the galaxy (he lives in “The Outer Rim” if you’re interested), and he is just a farmer on a desert planet.

As any good movie maker knows, you can’t leave your character on a desert planet as a farmer if you want to make a really good science fiction movie. He can stay there for a little while, but at some point in time he is going to have to stop traipsing around the desert looking for rouge droids and instead eventually (SPOILER ALERT!!) blow up the Death Star.

Here’s the deal though, if Luke wasn’t on that planet that he was on, the epic story about him could never have taken place. If Luke wasn’t on Tatooine, then he wouldn’t have come across the droids, Obi-wan, Han or Chewie, and would have never saved the princess. It turns out that the very thing that he found to be unbearable was the very thing that was necessary for a happy ending for the rebellion.

George Lucas is a good screenwriter, so he had a plan for his characters in his characters, and knew what they needed. How much more then, will God, the author and perfecter of life have a plan for each of us! Jeremiah 29:11: “For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope.”