Life Is Not Like 'Gilligan's Island'
I was thinking recently about two television shows. Gilligan's Island and Lost. They are both shows about a group of people who have been "shipwrecked" on an island, and are desperately trying to find a way off the island. Once you get beyond that, though, there are very few similarities between the shows.Gilligan's Island is primarily a comedy, with a lot of physical, slapstick humor. Lost has some funny moments, but it is primarily a fairly serious drama.
Gilligan's Island has characters who never change, and who never have any seriously life-altering events happen during their stay on the island. Lost characters are in a constant state of change, as they come face to face with the "demons" of their past.
Gilligan's Island cast of characters never changes. Lost has no compunction about killing off major characters.
But here's the difference I was thinking most about...
If you have never seen an episode of Gilligan's Island, you can sit down to watch a single episode, and everything will make sense. The theme song ("now sit right back and you'll hear a tale...") gives you all the background information you need about the characters and their situation, and then the next half-hour gives you a completely contained story with a beginning, plot development, and satisfying conclusion.
Lost is not like this. In Lost, no single episode completely stands alone. Sure, each episode has some "mystery" that is resolved/concluded, but for every mystery that is resolved, two more mysteries are introduced. As you watch the show, you eventually realize that nothing is accidental or coincidental, and if you see a scene that you think "I wonder why they put that in there..." you can bet that somewhere down the road...maybe as much as a season in the future...that scene is going to become important. But it may not make much sense at the time you watch it.
And as we watch the show, we find ourselves looking forward to the day when all the mysteries are resolved, and everything finally makes sense. We have some degree of faith that the writers are actually going to resolve all the mysteries; if we didn't have the hope of the final revelation of the mysteries, few of us would watch the show.
Life is much more like Lost than it is like Gilligan's Island. My life is not an episode of Gilligan's Island, which is completely self contained, and makes perfect sense (well, as much as Gilligan's Island ever made sense
) from start to finish. My life is much more like an episode of Lost. Yes, there are some mysteries that I'll resolve, but there are many that I never will resolve. If I go through life expecting that my life will make perfect sense, and everything will resolve during my lifetime to a sensible conclusion, then I'm going to be disappointed.But, just as I hope that the writers of Lost will resolve the mysteries of "The Island", I also have hope that, at the end of all things, the "author" of our universe will reveal all mysteries, and all will make sense.
I was thinking about this in connection with I Peter 1:1-12, in which Peter tells us that when the Old Testament prophets were prophecying about Jesus, they didn't really understand the details of their prophecy. In fact, it was finally revealed to them that their ministry was not really for the people of their own time, but for the people to come hundreds of years later. Can you imagine what it must have been like for Isaiah? Prophecying about Christ, then asking God "What exactly does this all mean?" And God says, "Oh, don't worry about it, Isaiah. This is a mystery that'll be resolved in about 700 years."
"Oh, great," Isaiah might have said, "My whole life is about something I'll never really understand."
He was just one episode in a story that spanned the millenia. But that didn't mean he was unimportant...just that he didn't understand his importance in the story.
The same is true of us. None of us can see the whole story, so we won't - in our lifetimes - understand the true importance of our lives in the grand scheme of things. So what do we do about it? We do what Peter instructed:
I Peter 1:13
Therefore, prepare your minds for action, keep sober in spirt, fix your hope completely on the grace to be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ.
Don't give up because your "episode" makes no sense to you. Get ready for action, because even though it makes no sense to you, in the grand scheme of things, your life matters. Fix your hope in that day when all the mysteries, all the secrets will be revealed.
Posted On Jan 28, 2006 at 6:07 AM
On Jan 28, 2006 Laura wrote: Reminds me of a line from a Michael W. Smith song - "Sometimes I wish I was in a movie or some 70's TV thing, where everything gets neatly wrapped by the end of the show." Yes, I did find that one of the more absurd features of Gilligan's Island (one of many). Although the bad thing about Lost is that you really can't just jump into any episode and expect to know what's going on, like you would with Gilligan's Island.
I think it's easy to use the fact that I don't know what "episode" I'm in (or how it will turn out) as an excuse to not get much done. Or to not aim at anything in particular - at least it feels like I'm doing that sometimes. Rather, I should be glad I'm not in control of my life, because I wouldn't know what I was doing!
Doug Replied: Hmm. I've never heard that MWS song, I don't think. I'll have to look up the lyrics to it.
Yeah, I've missed a few episodes of Lost, so there are still things I'm trying to figure out!
On Jan 29, 2006 Laura wrote: See, that's why I only watch old TV shows - that way you can just buy an entire season and control when you watch each episode, rather than trying to adjust your schedule for it ;-)
By the way, that lyric is from MWS's song "Love me good," off his CD "Live the life" - the only one of his I own, but it's a very good disc.
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