People may wonder why I started out to build a full-scale replica of R2D2. Simple. To serve God. My son wanted to do a father-son project. and was interested in building a robot. Not any robot, but R2D2. As a Christian, my first ministry is to be a good husband and dad.
Also, my wife, kids and I have a heart for serving God in huge ways, and we have a heart for terminally ill children (who doesn’t really?). So we set out from the beginning that aside from R2 being used for charity work and the visits to Children’s hospital, as a number of R2 builders do, we’d go as Christ’s messengers.
This involves more than just showing up with R2. It’s having the humility needed as a Christian, going at times when we are too tired, and witnessing all the time. To help with that, I wrote a small bible study on how to be a servant of God, using examples of R2 in the different Star Wars movies backed up with appropriate scripture.
We also will be using R2 at our home church, the Rock Church in San Diego, Ca. It’s easy to be humble in a small church of a few hundred, but it takes a lot of prayer for Godly wisdom, discernment, and humility when the thing you built is seen by thousands of people every so often – the Rock has about 15,000 people that attend, as well as thousands more online.
R2 will be focused on being used with the children’s ministry, Cancer Care, and I’m hoping in any of the main services using this bible study as inspiration. It’s already been used by one of the pastors there for a talk he gave at a Summer camp.
I’m hoping that you, who are reading this now, will use this for your family, as well as in your church. If you have your own R2, and you want some ideas how you can incorporate R2 into the church you attend, then ping me at gsdesign@cox.net.
Be blessed and I hope you enjoy this as much as I did putting it together.
Greg
The adventures of building R2-D2 