The Blast Zone

This weekend, we watched "August: Osage County" starring Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts.  This does contain spoilers, so if you're interested in seeing the movie, first please reconsider.  If you still want to see the movie, stop reading.  Good acting throughout, but not a light movie.  Very dark, despite the previews.

The movie chronicles a few days in the life of an extremely dysfunctional family.  Unfortunately, "extremely dysfunctional" is an understatement.  The twists and turns of the plot reveal level after level of pain.  Just when you think it can't get any worse for the family, it does!  What I found interesting in the movie was how each character dealt with pain.  My CPE supervisor would've had a field day with this movie.

Okay, final warning about the spoilers.

You look at the events of the movie, and how tragic they are.  The drug-addicted Meryl Streep; Julia Roberts, whose husband recently left her and who can't relate to her daughter; one sister who engages in an incestuous relationship because she can't find anything else; another sister who "has everything she wants" but also has a massive front built up to shield her from the deep sadness inside her; the alcoholic husband of Meryl, who hires a cook to take care of his wife and then leaves her, only to commit suicide.  Quite literally, every character in the movie has a deeply traumatic flaw/pain/event and it all explodes in the end.

I tried to imagine real people going through that... a real family.  It would be a wonder if there weren't more suicides!  Three thoughts struck me.

First, that simple verse from the letter of James: the wages of sin are death.  Not might be death, only death if you don't psychologically process your sins well.  A very plain equation.  Sin = death.  Bringing in adultery, addictions, and other dysfunction into life?  There's only one outcome if we don't root it out of our lives.

Second, sin is not a private matter.  No matter how we try to convince ourselves to the contrary (and our culture is convinced that sins can be private), we have to go back to the previous point.  Introducing sin into our lives inevitably affects others.  In the movie, two couples' poor choices scarred their lives, all of their children (4 total), their children's spouses, and their grandchild couldn't escape, either.  At its very nature, sin is destructive--of grace, of good things, and of anything good in our lives.  Give Satan his chance and he'll make the most of it.

Third, as I had compassion on these fictional folks in the movie, I realized that the explosion of darkness and sin wasn't a sudden onset.  These poor people set the stage for this nastiness long ago.  Meryl Streep & her husband chose addictions rather than a life-giving marriage (in the opening of the movie, the husband tells the cook that he and his wife had made an arrangement long ago, not to bother each other about their respective addictions).  Meryl's sister chose to have an affair to cope with her husband's smoking habits (not cigarettes).  The mess that their families became was a direct result of those choices.  Isn't it the same with us?  Problems we have in our spiritual life don't usually come out of nowhere.

Although I was somewhat depressed after watching this movie, it was an interesting insight into human nature.  It convinced me, even more than before, of how much we're in need of a Savior.  Thank you Lord!