With "Happily Ever After," most stories come to "The End." But not LOST. We still have seven hours left, many miles to go, and many mysteries to solve. For Desmond, though, and possibly for the audience, something huge has happened. For all intents and purposes, happily ever after has arrived. As Charlie and later Daniel informed us, none of "this" matters. And the things that do matter? Like love? They're settled, quite possibly sealed for all time.

 

Which brings me to an interesting conversation I had with a friend in vocational ministry yesterday morning over Instant Messenger:

 

Him: Soooooo confused... Now Des is making our "Sideways" actually something else entirely? And I have NO clue what's making him so passive and agreeable to Widmore AND psycho Sayid.

Me: You should have a clue, as it's called Faith. Desmond's glimpsed something that has caused him to believe that no matter what, things are going to turn out beautifully. So he's amenable to just about anything. He knows what matters, and that the path to it may change but most of the events will remain the same. And that even if things don't turn out beautifully for him (as in, if he has to sacrifice himself), he can still save it for those who matter to him. He quite possibly has also realized that maybe death is not the end; perhaps just a transfer of consciousness. And the sideways world was always going to be "something else," as in, most likely - the way things come to be, or a merge with island events.

Him: Yeah - just didn't love the episode. It was cool, building, building, and then... no clue what happened.

 

Does that describe you this morning? Then let's take a deeper look and see if we can clear things up. What I find fascinating is how the story keeps evolving to higher planes of meaning and meaningfulness. We get the love theme right on the heels of the faith theme and after the hope motif has been so prevalent for so long. In some ways, LOST has reminded us in its journey of the same journey the Apostle Paul takes us on in 1 Corinthians 13:13 about the only things that "remain" or endure or matter - faith, hope, and love. And the greatest of these? Love…

 

I also spoke yesterday in person and online with several people who missed a lot of the cool stuff because they got caught up in the soap opera of Widmore family relations, forcing their brain to focus on that instead of the more important stuff. So it bears mentioning before we get started that…

 

Original timeline: Charles Widmore and Eloise Hawking, leaders of the Others, had a son, Daniel. He was apparently conceived on the island, but we don't know if he was born on it. Eloise raised him on her own off-island, giving him the last name Faraday, and pushing him from his love of piano into physics, for which he was equally gifted. Charles also fathered Penny with a non-Other, which is part of what got him exiled from the Island when Ben found out about it. Penny was raised with the name Widmore, though she apparently lived separate from him while knowing him in London. Daniel died on the island while time-traveling, and his own mother, not knowing who he was, shot him in the back. But it was only the possibility of reversing this fate that convinced Ellie to show the time-skipping 1977 Losties where to find Jughead. Note: what seemed to confuse most of my friends and set them down the wrong path was Widmore's early line this week about "my son died on this island." They assumed that meant Charlie rather than Daniel, and had that in their heads the whole time, apparently forgetting the episode where we learned Daniel was Widmore's son, too. So, just to clarify: Charlie is not related to the Widmores.