“You can’t get so hung up on where you’d rather be
that you can’t make the most of where you are.” – Aurora Lane –
**Spoiler Alert**
I don’t really know how to discuss this without giving away the ending, so please forgive me that one.
“Say you were trapped on an island all alone and you had the power to wish someone there with you, but you were sentencing her to a life on the island, too. … Say you found a way to make your life 100% better but it was wrong and you couldn’t take it back. How do you do the math on that?” This is the horrific dilemma Jim finds himself in. He awoke 90 years too soon on a space ship heading to a new life on a new planet. He can’t go back asleep. He’s the only person alive. How do you survive something like that? It’s not good for man to be alone, the Bible says. There was no other living thing alive there to keep him company… unless he chose to wake up another passenger—and he’d found the ideal woman to keep him company.
He held out for quite a while. Two years, I think it was? Complete solitude on board the space ship. Finally, he caved. He woke up Aurora. It was going great until she found out the truth. His pod malfunctioned. Hers was a result of his choice. She was angry. She equated his choice to murder. The two of them were now sentenced to live out their days together but alone, on board that ship.
Aurora had a huge choice to make. She could forgive Jim, whom she had grown to love, and make the best of the situation with him. Or, she could be angry, withhold her forgiveness, and even choose to go back to sleep and live out her life as originally planned, sentencing Jim to the rest of his years alone. (Eventually they found a medical unit which would allow an induced coma or some such, but it was only an option for one person.)
Aurora’s choice was guided largely by the same guiding ideas that led her to take a journey that would separate her from all of her friends and the life she’d known in the first place. Her father used to tell her, “If you live an ordinary life all you’ll have are ordinary stories. So, you have to live a life of adventure.” She chose wild adventure and risk. She chose to live a life that was a good story to tell.
Her other guiding principle was that “You can’t get so hung up on where you’d rather be that you can’t make the most of where you are.” It’s akin to the saying, “The grass isn’t greenest on the other side; it’s greenest where it’s watered.” She chose to stay. To forgive. To live a life of adventure and love. To make the best out of her situation and water the grass she found herself in.
Jim had a similar spirit driving his life. He was a mechanic. He had a heart to fix things, not replace them. The modern world didn’t need mechanics because the modern world didn’t fix things. He wanted to go to a place where things could be cultivated, valued, repaired, invested in. He wanted to be somebody, to go to a place where mechanics were somebody, too.
They were an unlikely pair. They never would have met in the world they’d come from, but they were well suited to each other because they were the kinds of people who took what they had and made it better. Truly, when considering who you might marry, single people, don’t undervalue this quality! Marry someone who has a mechanic’s heart. Marry someone who isn’t so hung up on what they’d rather have that they can’t make the best of where they are.
So what do we learn from this movie?
- It isn’t good for man to be alone.
- Forgive, forgive, forgive. We need each other.
- Be willing to live a wild, crazy, adventurous life of faith. It’s not an endorsement of foolishness, but be willing to follow the Lord to new horizons. Those who do have the best stories.
- Be grateful for what you have and make the most of it (rather than bemoaning what you don’t have). It may take a little while, but in the end you may just find, as Aurora and Jim did, life wasn’t what you expected, but it was nonetheless wonderful.