May The 4th Be With You

You are Luke. You are Leia. You are Han. And the galaxy needs you to show up.

Today, millions of people will say it to each other.

May the 4th be with you.

They’ll say it with a smirk. A knowing nod. A text to an old friend they haven’t talked to in six months. They’ll post it on Instagram with a lightsaber filter and move on with their Tuesday.

I want to slow down. I want to linger in that sentence.

Because “be with you” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that little phrase. And I think most of us, especially the ones who’ve been through some things lately know exactly what it means to need something to be with you.

Luke Skywalker: The Son

Luke starts the story as a boy playing at the edge of the world.

He is restless. He is certain the universe has more in store for him. He is also, and this matters, completely wrong about what form that destiny will take.

He thinks the Force is about power. He learns it’s about surrender.

He thinks becoming a Jedi is about defeating enemies. He learns it’s about choosing not to.

He thinks his father is beyond saving. He is wrong about that, too.

There is a Luke in every one of us. The part that stood at the edge of something whether it be a relationship, a career, or a family moment, and felt like the horizon was calling. The part that was impatient with the present because we were so convinced we were built for something larger.

Luke’s real arc isn’t hero-to-warrior. It’s boy-to-son.

He doesn’t defeat the Empire. He redeems his father.

That’s the quieter miracle buried in all that mythology. All the X-wings and lightsabers and Death Stars are just backdrop to a son who refused to give up on his dad. Who walked into the darkness not to conquer it, but to reach the man still alive inside it.

If you’ve lost someone, you know this scene. You’ve played it yourself. Standing at a bedside, or across a dinner table, or at a grave reaching for the man inside the silence. Trying to say the things that always felt too large for ordinary Tuesday afternoons.

Be like Luke. Reach anyway.

Princess Leia: The One Holding Everything Together

Leia never gets to fall apart.

She watches her entire planet get obliterated. She keeps moving. She organizes the Rebellion. She gives the mission. She holds the grief like a stone in her chest and refuses to let it stop her feet.

That is not strength. That is survival. And we should stop confusing the two.

Every family has a Leia. The one who makes the calls after the funeral. Who keeps the calendar organized when everyone else is underwater. Who cries in the car, alone, where nobody can see,and then walks back inside and asks if anyone needs anything.

Leia is the caretaker who never gets cared for. The architect of everyone else’s resilience.

The tragedy of Leia and the real human beings she represents is that her competence becomes a cage. People stop asking if she’s okay because she always seems okay. Because she is so good at being the answer that no one thinks to be the answer for her.

Here is what I know: the people holding your world together are exhausted.

Tell them you see them. Not with a text. With your actual presence. With the willingness to sit in the discomfort of someone else’s grief without rushing to fix it.

Leia deserved that. So do the Leia’s in your life.

Han Solo: The Man Who Stayed

Han Solo doesn’t believe in the Force.

He’s a skeptic. A cynic. A man who has been burned enough times that optimism looks like stupidity to him. He shows up for money. He says he’s leaving. He comes back anyway.

Han Solo is every man who ever said he wasn’t the sentimental type, and then wept at his kid’s graduation. Every father who showed love through action because words felt like too much exposure. Every husband who drove three hours in traffic on a random Wednesday because his wife mentioned, once, that she missed a restaurant they’d been to ten years ago.

Showing up is a love language. Han is fluent.

But here is the harder truth about Han: he almost didn’t stay. He had to be convinced. He had to be pulled back into something larger than his own self-protection.

We all have that moment. The one where we almost walked away from the thing that would define us. The marriage we almost let go cold. The relationship with a child we let drift for too long. The father we kept meaning to call.

Han’s heroism isn’t the Kessel Run. It’s coming back.

It is always coming back.

A New Hope. Always, A New Hope.

The first film isn’t called “Star Wars.”

It is called “A New Hope.”

George Lucas, whatever his flaws as a filmmaker, understood something about mythology that we forget: the story doesn’t begin with the battle. It begins with the hope that the battle is worth having.

Hope is not optimism. Optimism is passive. It’s a belief that things will probably work out. Hope is active. It’s a decision to act as if they can… even when the evidence says otherwise. Even when you’re sitting in the wreckage of something you loved and the debris is still warm.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately.

About what it means to lose someone who was the gravitational center of your world. About how grief doesn’t announce itself politely and wait for a convenient moment. About how the people who are most irreplaceable are, by definition, the ones whose absence reshapes everything.

And I keep coming back to this: hope rises.

Not because loss is small. It isn’t. Not because time heals everything. That is something people say to fill the silence.

Hope rises because that is what hope does. It is not contingent on circumstances. It is not earned by suffering enough. It is a posture. A choice. A daily act of rebellion against the darkness.

Luke chose it when he threw down his lightsaber.

Leia chose it when she transmitted the plans.

Han chose it when he came back.

Be That Hope.

Today is May 4th. The galaxy is a mess. The personal galaxies most of us inhabit, the marriages, the families, the careers, or the inner lives we’re quietly managing are complicated and imperfect and full of unresolved sequels.

You are Luke, trying to reach someone through the distance they’ve built around themselves.

You are Leia, holding it together when holding it together is the only option you’ve allowed yourself.

You are Han, showing up, imperfectly, belatedly, skeptically, but showing up.

That is enough. That has always been enough.

The Rebellion wasn’t won by people who had it figured out. It was won by people who kept moving anyway. Who chose hope not because the odds were good, but because hope was the only thing worth choosing.

Go find your Luke. Your Leia. Your Han.

Tell them what they mean to you before the moment passes. Before the galaxy shifts again. Before there’s another reason to wait.

May the 4th be with you.

And may you be with the people who need you most.