Covering up the messy?

I just found this on a friend's/colleague's blog: "I have yet to find the story of a fully healthy and functional family in the Word of God (the Bible). So that we wouldn't lose heart or hope, God graciously made sure we'd know that in things pertaining to the sons of the earth, abnormal is more normal than normal. That doesn't mean we should surrender to dysfunction. It means we don't have to hang our heads as we surrender to God and let Him sort out our tangled mess." It is from a Bible Study called "Believing God". Don't know much else, except my family fits well into an abnormal mould, if such a thing exists! I think evangelical Christians spend a lot of time trying to pretend they are normal or trying to project an image of normality. By doing so we put up walls that hinder us from having deep relationships with others. And probably we limit the relationship we can have with God. If we admit the "tangled mess", then we can get on with living, rather than hiding the mess. Last week we watched a weird movie called, "The Talented Mr Ripley". Basically it is about an average kind of guy who gets mistaken for the friend of a son of a wealthy man. Oddly enough the man offers to pay Tom Ripley (the average guy) to go and persuade his son who is fooling around in Italy, to come home to America. It turns out that Tom will do anything to get a leg up in circumstances. He ends up killing the supposed friend, but it is made to look almost like an accident in the movie. He covers up the death, not telling anyone, indeed on occasion, pretending that he is the other guy. He also took money out of his 'friend's' account and wore his rings. He perpetuated the myth for quite a while, including forging letters from his friend. Then kills another who is getting suspicious of the lies and a third right at the end. It is really a strange movie. But what I came away with was the cost of lies. He could be honest with no one - to perpetuate the lie of a wealthy life, he had to kill anyone who got close to discovering the truth that he was a nobody who used to tune pianos. But we do the same. When we cover up the truth of our messy lives. When we try to pretend we are better than we are. We kill relationships. We alienate ourselves from others. Okay, off my soapbox and onto supervising homework.