I can’t help thinking about information this morning.  Remember the old Prisoner TV show?  The Prisoner would ask in the interrogation: “What do you want?” And Number 2 would answer: “Information!”  To which the Prisoner would respond:  “You won’t get it!”  And they never did.

Fast forward about 45 years and my husband and I are watching (for the first time) the TV series Lost.  One of our sons invited us to watch it with him (he lives on the West Coast) and we are calling each other at planned intervals to share our comments, conjectures, questions, suspicions, and the general impact the show is making on us.   And this morning I can’t help thinking about information – specifically the sharing of it.

If there is anything I am learning from the premise of the show it is that information should be shared.  As the story advances, each of the characters, for whatever reason, finds out some piece of information and then keeps it to themselves as if sharing the information with someone else would interfere with any chance they may have of ever being rescued.  Yet, this hording of information brings further calamity.

It makes me think about how often we hold onto information and don’t share it.  Why do we do that?  Perhaps because we think it’s not important, or someone else would not know what to do with it, or we want to have control over something or someone.

Yet, in the Christian understanding of things, information is meant to be shared.  If we honor community and our place in it as a member of the whole, then each of us is gifted with a piece of the truth and each of us holds a vital part of that truth.  No one has all of the truth, but we each share a significant piece of the truth which is our own lived experience.  We are challenged to share that truth – the information – we have with others so that it can be blended with the community’s story.  When everyone shares, then the community’s story can evolve into a fuller reality that is the collective truth.

Nobody has it all together, but together we have it all.

I realize that if the characters in Lost shared what they knew with each other, it probably wouldn’t make a very entrapping story line.  But life is not intended to be lived like the characters in fictional settings.  Sharing what we know, what we experience, and what we are thinking or planning, is a mature response to life.  Listening as others share enriches us.  Sharing information offers the opportunity for graced moments and a fuller engagement with all of life.