I don’t think I had even seen the original Star Wars movie when I got my first Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader toys. I was only six years old and I didn’t really understand who these two figures were, but I knew one was good and one was bad, and I remember the early days of enacting sword battles between them. By the time The Empire Strikes Back was released in 1980, I was ten years old and had been collecting Star Wars toys for four years. I saved every dime of my allowance for the next character. I would wait in anticipation as my Mom would drive me to the local Gibson’s to make the purchase. Every birthday and Christmas present were Star Wars toys. By the time I was around twelve years old I had amassed a treasure trove of toys from the Star Wars universe. Each new toy I acquired added another dimension of excitement and joy to my world. And I was a purist. I would never mix Star Wars with any other toy line. It was almost a religion. And that was a problem.
I had decided to follow Christ at a very young age. I understood that God wanted my complete and devoted love. The conflict between my love for Star Wars and my love for God became evident to me one day. I remember the moment clearly. My Dad was building a two-story addition to a house we had recently moved in to. I was playing with my Star Wars collection in a framework of a room when I suddenly stopped and told God, “If I love these toys more than You, then take them away from me.” Then I kept right on playing.
In what must have been a few months later, the addition to the house was mostly complete, but it was still easily accessible to anyone. I was showing the progress of the building to a friend who lived in a trailer park a few blocks away. We happened upon my huge cardboard box of Star Wars toys. I showed them off with pride. “I keep them all in this box,” I’m sure I must have told him.
Several days later my friend showed up again along with a gang of boys whom I’d never met. I remember that there were six or seven of them. He introduced them to me and we hung out in the front yard for a while, at the opposite end of the house addition. The new boys said that they were going to leave, but my friend said he wanted to stay. I remember him urging me to stay in the front yard. I thought nothing of it at the time. In fact, what weighed heavy on my mind was to tell that boy about what Christ had done for him. I explained how Jesus paid for our sins when He died on a cross, and how all we need to do is accept His gift to be with God. It was a very basic introduction to salvation through Christ. The boy prayed to receive Christ as his personal Savior. Soon after, he left for home.
It wasn’t immediately that I realized… it was a day or two… my box of Star Wars toys… I couldn’t find it…
My parents and I searched the house. We checked the new addition. We looked through closets. We searched outside the house and in our cars. There was only one conclusion: the toys had been stolen. We drove up and down the nearby drainage ditch, where kids would play, looking for a box or for scattered toys. We found nothing. A couple of days later, my parents filed a police report. I remember a uniformed officer sitting at our table. I described each of my toys in detail, naming them off like some kind of intergalactic playlist, “Hammerhead, Boba Fett, Millennium Falcon, Bespin Guard, Tauntaun…” He wrote each one down as he asked for spellings and descriptions that must have seemed outrageous to him, but secondhand to me. The list was so long that the officer had to use at least two additional sheets of paper. “This is a felony,” I distinctly remember him saying. I didn’t know what it meant, but I heard a change of tone in his voice.
Naturally, I was devastated. I had devoted virtually half of my life to collecting and playing with these toys, and now they were gone. Imagine that for a moment: ALL of my toys were just… gone. I laid there in my bed, talking to God about it. Everyone was asleep. The house was dark. Then, I felt the need to tell my parents something. I got out of bed and walked into their bedroom.
“Mom, I’m really sad that my toys are gone. But… I still feel a happiness inside. Is that okay?” It’s true, I didn’t understand how I could be sad and yet still at peace. I almost felt guilty about it. “That’s Jesus,” my Mom replied. “That’s Jesus.”
It wasn’t until a few days later that I put all the pieces together. I guess I was so shocked by the disappearance of my toys that I didn’t think of the obvious. While my friend from down the street was occupying me in the front yard, the others went around the back and stole the box of toys. I went to my friend’s house to confront him. His mother met me at the door and told me to leave and not to come back. We didn’t pursue the matter any further, but I’m sure it was those boys, and I’m sure their mother knew what they had done. As to why she didn’t do anything about it, I’ll never know for sure. Perhaps she feared the police. Perhaps she just needed Jesus in her life.
There are so many lessons that I took away from this experience; lessons that I still adhere to today. First, be careful what you ask God for. I outright asked God to tangibly let me know if I was putting Star Wars before Him, and apparently, I was. I might have rephrased that request if I had it to do over again, asking for some other sign than to remove the toys from my life. This would be a lesson I would learn several more times in my life. God does listen to us. He answers prayers. But sometimes the answer isn’t what we want to hear. God was so real in the answer to that prayer. He is undeniable, and that’s the bigger lesson.
Second, doing the right thing doesn’t always mean that something bad won’t happen to you during the process. I was literally trying to help save someone’s life during the exact same time that my childhood was being robbed from me. I hope and pray that if that boy didn’t genuinely ask for God’s gift of life through Jesus that day, that at some point in his life he has done so. As Christians, all we can do is plant the seeds. And while all was being stolen from me, I was planting the seed of the Gospel. If I had to sacrifice all of my toys for that one soul, it was worth it.
Finally, I experienced a true peace that literally made no sense, just as described in Philippians 4:7. It’s a peace that would take me through some very dark places in my life. It’s a peace that continues to dwell in me, no matter what the situation.
I wouldn’t trade that peace for all the toys in the world.
“That’s Jesus.”