The Force, a Pay Phone, and My Father
Field Note: A Memory in the Wake of The Mandalorian & Grogu
The rain was just a coat of varnish on the asphalt.
It lacked the muscle to kick up that rich summer dirt smell, but it gave the evening a clean shine. The cinema car park was all movement: umbrellas shaking open, car doors slamming, families making that shared dash toward somewhere dry. The air smelled of wet concrete and possibility.
The sedan idled at the kerb.
And my father, in what now feels like either remarkable trust or questionable parenting, handed me freedom in the form of a five-dollar bill.
Star Wars money.
I was about ten.
Inside my pockets was the intoxicating weight of autonomy, alongside snacks wrapped in wax paper and packed from home. Ours was not a family that bought food at the theatre. Cinema tickets, yes. Lobby popcorn at criminal markups? Absolutely not.
Todd and I stepped out into the damp night, vibrating with excitement.
Then came disaster.
By the time we reached the ticket window, the session was sold out.
I turned back toward the shimmering asphalt and looked for the sedan.
Gone.
In the way only children can move from inconvenience to catastrophe in under three seconds, I became convinced my father had left us. Abandoned at the movies. With wax paper snacks. Like some oddly specific Dickens subplot.
Of course, he had not.
We bought tickets for the late showing, found a pay phone, and called home. Dad returned what felt impossibly fast, arriving somewhere between a concerned parent and a district attorney. He made a fierce case to theatre management that no sane adult should sell late-night movie tickets to ten-year-olds, even if the film involved lightsabers, before ushering us back into the dry warmth of the car.
Funny how quickly the human heart writes abandonment stories.
One missing car. One silent moment. One incomplete set of facts.
And suddenly the story becomes: I am on my own.
Which may be why Star Wars has always felt like more than science fiction to me.
Beneath the space battles and the family dysfunction in excellent robes, the saga keeps circling a deeply human longing. Not the Force itself, exactly. But what the Force points toward.
The hope that we are not lost in the universe.
That something holds.
Obi-Wan calls it the force that binds the galaxy together. Chirrut walks into impossible danger, repeating, “I am one with the Force, and the Force is with me,” as though the words themselves can hold him steady. Luke insists no one is ever truly gone. Yoda tells Rey, “Alone, never have you been.”
Different stories. Same ache.
The longing for presence.
The hope that, beneath all the noise and uncertainty, we are held somehow.
People reach for different language here. Providence. Grace. Love. God.
But most of us know the opposite feeling too.
A diagnosis. A delayed phone call. A closed door. A season where life goes very quiet.
And the story forms quickly.
Gone. Left. Forgotten.
Maybe faith is the slow practice of distrusting the stories fear writes in the silence.
That rainy night, I was almost certain I was alone.
I was not.
Perhaps that is why stories like Star Wars keep finding us.
Not because we believe in Jedi, but because we recognise the ache.
Because some stubborn part of us still hopes the deepest truth in the universe is not abandonment.
But presence.1
If this resonated, someone in your life might need it too. Forward it to one person this week.
Hebrews: 13:5b - “Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you.”