The producers of Lost say they knew from the start of the series how it would end. It began with a close-up on an eye opening, with the lead character, Jack, awakening on the island where his plane crashed: It would end with his death in the same spot, and a close-up on his eye closing.

Well, I've known almost from the start how my Lost post-mortem column would begin. "In the end, Lost wasn't a Christian show. But...."

Even without knowing how things would end, this part wasn't hard to anticipate. It's long been clear that Lost was a spiritual show, full of themes of sin, forgiveness, redemption and the supernatural, with numerous Christian characters and references in the mix. (I first wrote about this five years ago, and recently the themes have only gotten stronger.) It's also long been clear that Christianity was just one of the influences on the show: Other religions and philosophies have been in the mix. So it's always figured that the finale would be (A) spiritual and (B) something of a spiritual alphabet soup.

And so it was. In a nutshell, everyone dies and goes to heaven.

In a slightly larger nutshell, the final season presents two storylines: A battle against an evil force on the island and a parallel world where, apparently, the characters' plane never crashed on the island. In the Los Angeles of that world, they slowly "wake up" to remember the island lives where they found redemption, and the loved ones they'd left behind. In the finale, they do — and when they do, they end up in the afterlife, though (we're told) they'd died many years apart. (Time doesn't matter there.)

The good part: The crossing-over scene is set at a church with a large statue of Christ in front and a large cross inside. The bad part: The windows show symbols of multiple faiths (Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Bahá'í). See, all religions lead to the same place.

Sigh. Never get your theology from a network TV series, kids. Not even a really good one.

And it was really good, really often. Not always. But it gave us a whole lot of challenging writing, fine acting, and above all, characters you care about and badly want to be redeemed. (There's so much redeeming to be done. Sawyer the con man, Charlie the drug addict, Sayid the Iraqi soldier-turned-torturer....) Six years of loves, losses, joys, tragedies. It's not many shows that can make me cry so many times in their finale. (OK, Lost fans, which "awakening" moment was your biggest tearjerker? Mine was the Charlie/Claire reunion.)

What got some people's attention was the series' involved mythology. An island with supernatural properties, some of them sci-fi, some mystical. A complex history for the locale and the characters. Lots of questions, and we never did get all the answers. What exactly is this island? To what extent does it have a mind or a consciousness? What's up with that bright light ("the source") at the heart of the place? And that parallel-universe Los Angeles — was it the afterlife (purgatory?) all along? Or was it at some point a physical reality which our people spiritually departed in the end? If the latter, just how — excuse me, now my head hurts. (If you don't know what I'm talking about, never mind.)

Not getting the answers bugged some viewers. We waited all this time and you still wouldn't tell us? Me — the more I think about it, not so much. That's partly because I was into the show more for the people than for the mythology, which worked best as a device for telling people stories, and worked worst when it crowded out those stories. And partly because I like a series that teaches viewers to accept lots of unsolvable mystery. It's not just a good storytelling device. It's a good way to look at the world.

Lost always was a mystery — not, as one writer pointed out, a CSI-style mystery, but a mystical mystery that demands interpretation. It's been a story that suggested the world was far greater than we could ever grasp. There are more things on heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy, as Hamlet says. Too many answers would have defeated the purpose.

That was the importance of Jack's journey. He began as a rigid rationalist, unwilling to believe in anything he couldn't explain, a worldview which clashed with living in a place where signs of the supernatural kept creeping in. He ended up as a believer in forces and purposes that were beyond him. Not coincidentally, he also began by compulsively trying to "fix" everyone and everything: He had, as Sawyer said, a God complex. He ended up humbly accepting that he wasn't God, and that a lot of things were simply beyond him.

Christians get this, or at least we should. At times we may want to demand answers to everything, demands that we understand everything. But we can't have that. We live with mystery. We can't fathom God. We can't fathom His creation or incarnation or resurrection. We can know many things that are beyond our natural ability to understand, because He has revealed them to us in His Word. Ultimately, though, all our "But why" questions must stop. We can exert our intellects within their sphere of competence; we can do that a lot. But in the end, we must be able simply to say "This is the Word of the Lord." And to be at peace with that.

Lost helped foster that faith-friendly mindset. I'd say it was one of the most faith-friendly shows ever — maybe the most. Its weakness, predictably, was that it couldn't say where to place our faith. But as I wrote five years ago, it's still got pre-evangelism value because many of its themes speak to spiritual realities:

All of us know certain things deep down, even when we try to pretend otherwise. We sense that the world is a vast, wondrous place, with mysteries and a Maker beyond our comprehension. We know what it's like to be lost souls in need of redemption. We know the consciousness of sin, the experience of guilt and the longing to be cleansed of its stain. We know the desire to start over again, refreshed and healed. These are the basic realities of our lives, and they're bound to have a powerful pull on us all. There's no getting away from them.

Stories can help awaken people to these realities. Hopefully, when they wake up, they won't venture to that church-of-all-religions where Lost ended up. Hopefully they'll venture to the Savior by whom the lost are found.