We laid out the plot of the movie Interstellar last time. A plight of dust has struck the earth and by all accounts will be fatal. What could be more important than doing everything necessary to find another habitable world and getting as many people as possible there, before the earth dies? The answer is . . . the love between one father and his daughter.

Now, obviously, that doesn’t mean that the two of them are more important than anyone else, or that it didn’t make sense for this father, who also happens to be a NASA pilot, to leave earth to try to find another habitable world.

In a strange twist, his leaving didn’t solve anything, for his mission will be fruitless — and yet it solved everything, for at some point they were able to breach time and space and he was able to get the exact information in outer space that his daughter needed back on earth to solve a gravity equation (for she had grown up and become a NASA mathematician); which allowed a mass exodus from earth to a place they had discovered near Saturn that was habitable. I know that was a lot to keep up with, but I did my best. Watching the movie may help.

And so, with much to get distracted by, and with maybe the most serious mission anyone could ever imagine, this story, asks the question — what is the most important thing in your life? What should you be more focused on than anything else? What . . . or who?

I grew up the youngest of three boys. My mother’s mother died from cancer when she was quite young, when my mother was still in her twenties. After having two boys, my mother very much wanted a girl. I was to be her mother’s namesake, Lilian. But lo and behold, that was not God’s plan, and I was named after my father’s father, Sam. But I did get Lee as a middle name, the best she could do under the circumstances. And my parents decided to not try again. And so, I did not grow up with a sister. And I had three sons myself, and so, no daughters.

I now have five grandchildren, four boys, and one girl, Violet, who is now ten. Her family is in town, so I get to see her a lot. And I have to say, girls are very, very different than boys. Purposely. By design.

The Bible makes clear God “conceived and bore” us, has always provided for us, intimately cares for us, and will forever look over and protect us. He has always been both maternal and paternal. For reasons of His own, He chose to create male and female separately in the animal kingdom, displaying in a very concrete and distinctive way, these two different aspects of His nature. This is not something we talk about, but it is quite incredible, is it not? God didn’t have to make us the way He did, He could do whatever He pleased. And yet, He did. And so, there must be an important reason for why there is both male and female in this world.

It has been a real blessing to watch my son Josh with his daughter Violet. He is a good, loving and very present father with all three of his children, but it’s different with Violet. There’s something there that’s hard to pin down, to identify, to name; something precious, something unique. I imagine it is similar with the relationship between mothers and sons, a little extra magic that God instilled there.

And I must not be alone in this, for Christopher Nolan and his brother Jonathan, who wrote the Interstellar screenplay, chose for this to be real message. More specifically, when Christopher asked Hans Zimmer to write the main score, he purposely only told him the movie was about “what it meant to be a father.” That was it. Nothing more, not about space, or the end of the world, or anything.

Only after Hans shared the basic melody he’d come up with, did Christopher tell him what the movie was about. Hans felt what he had done was insufficient — “I’ve written this tiny, tiny little thing . . . this very fragile, personal thing.”

But Christopher replied, “Yeah. I know where the heart of the movie is now.”

That story demonstrates that Christopher Nolan recognizes the importance of music, the power of music, to set the tone, to strike the heart, to transport us . . . beyond the stars.

Last time I shared the link to Spotify for the Interstellar main theme on piano. Please listen to it again. What do you hear more than anything else? The mysteries of this universe, or the yearnings of a father’s heart for his daughter?

Next time.