Lost with You

People need people.

Well, that’s what I got from it at least.

If you don’t know what the above image is from, where have you been the past six years?  In all seriousness though, i’m sure you didn’t get through last Sunday without at least hearing mention of the series finale of LOST.  Yup, the SERIES finale.  I’m sure some of you are thinking “good riddance” and I guess that’s cool if you really didn’t like it, but personally, I loved it.  It was that one television staple in my week that I never missed.  I’ve got to say, I’ll be missing it too.

(Tread wearily LOST fans. Spoilers will not be excluded.)

Anyway, as I mentioned before, last Sunday held what we had all been waiting for:  the whopping two hour series finale of LOST.  Now, if you don’t watch the show you may be wondering if I have any point to make.  Yes.  As a matter of fact, I do.

The series as a whole has always been filled with religious undertones.  Heck, undertones may even be a little lax.  From the beginning science and faith have butted heads many times.  I’m glad to say that I took a very religious and powerful meaning from the ending.

For those of you who don’t even know what i’m talking about, LOST is about a group of plane-wrecked survivors trying to make a life of their situation and eventually try to make it back home.  There’s a smoke monster, a secret group called the Dharma Initiative, time travel, polar bears, and even giant bodiless Egyptian statues.  Confused yet?  Good, go watch it and find out the details with that stuff.  The cool thing though, is that none of that really matters.  Let me explain..

In this final season we have been introduced to scenes called “flash sideways’.”  In the end, they became sort of a “purgatory”  or an in-between of life and death.  Basically, all of the members met in this purgatory before they moved on together.

It’s really a touching scene.  This is about the point everyone started to cry, by the way.  But really, Jack’s dad makes a great point when he says “The most important part of your life is the time you spent with these people.  Nobody does it alone, Jack.  You needed all of them, and they needed you.”

That scene really just left me contempt with the show.  It doesn’t matter what happened to Hurley and Ben or if Lapidus actually got the last few of them home.  It doesn’t matter at all.  ”It’s not about the destination.  It’s about the journey.”  All the mysteries on the island don’t matter.  Heck, the island itself doesn’t matter.  What does matter though are the lives of the characters on the island.  The relationships they formed, the bonds they’ve created, that’s what it’s all about.

This ending struck a direct parallel with something my pastor was talking about a few weeks ago.  I remember him talking about how with Christ, yeah, the birth and the death are important, but what about all of the stuff in between?  We tend to forget about all of it even though it is just as important.  He went on to compare it to our own lives.  Just like we just learned from Lost,  the people you spend time with and the relationships you form are just as important as all the other stuff.

We can’t make it through life without people.

“28 One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?”

“The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. ³⁰Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ ³¹The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’There is no commandment greater than these.”

-Mark 12:28-31

In short: Love God and Love People.

I’d say that fits pretty well.  We are commanded to love and live in community with our neighbor.  It’s that very community that makes or breaks how we spend our life.  Do you want to be at the end of the tunnel thinking, “man.. I wish I had someone here with me” or do you want to be surrounded by people who truly love you?  Of course you want to be surrounded by your loved ones.

The community we begin to make as a child will continue to push on until we let it die.  I know it’s a bit depressing, but we’ll all die eventually.  The question is, do you want to live your life with people and true community or be the one who sit’s on the sidelines?

It’s not about how you die.  It’s not about when you die.  It’s all about the memories you’ve made and the relationships that have blossomed along the way.