Many of you will have, I’m sure, visited the town on Oban either to enjoy wandering around the town or to catch a ferry to an island.
As you go around the town you might notice, as you look up at some of the older buildings, brown staining, weeping down the façade or where the building has been painted, brown staining leeching through the paint. This is a sure sign that this building was constructed using what is known locally as Druimvargie stone.
Photo by Andrew Dawes on Unsplash
Druimvargie stone is rich in iron peroxide, and as this interacts with the rain and wet salty Oban air the iron reacts
and “weeps”. No matter what paint you use, or how many coats of paint you apply to the building, if the building has Druimvargie stone eventually it will leak out and you’ll end up with brown stains on the façade.
What are you built of?
The New Testament on several occasions uses the image of building to speak about our lives. Ones which spring to my mind are the famous parable which Jesus told of the two people, one who builds on rock and the other who foolishly builds on sand (Matthew 7: 24 – 28). Or, in 1 Corinthians 3, Paul tells us to build our lives with “precious stones” (v. 10 – 15) and Peter tells us that we are like living stones who are being built together (1 Peter 2: 4 – 5).
Here is an uncomfortable truth, all of us have more Drumvargie stone in our lives than we’d like to admit.
Why an Uncomfortable Truth?
What do I mean, when I say all of us have bits of Drumvargie stone in our make-up?
Negative feelings and emotions that we do not process, or resolve, do not go away. They are like the iron peroxide in Drumvargie stone, imbedded but eventually leaking out. If we are honest with ourselves, we know this to be true; those feelings and emotions we’ve buried deep down, or masked, eventually leak out.
Getting to the Heat of the Issue
To remove the Drumvargie stone from buildings in Oban is too costly, so owners just live with the stains or frequently hide the stains with paint.
The good news of the gospel is that we don’t need to live with the emotional equivalent of Drumvargie stone in our lives. Nor do we need to hide, bury, or mask them.
Jesus wants to transform, reconstruct, redirect, refashion and reorientate our lives so they are built on him with precious stones he gives us and not stones with impurities. However, this does not mean it is not costly or that hard work is not required.
Allowing the Holy Spirit to highlight feelings, emotions, things we have done, or which have been done to us, which we’ve buried deep in our hearts is not comfortable.
Prayerfully exploring why these feelings and emotions have become lodged in our hearts takes time and an openness to doing the hard work of re-visiting things in our lives we’d rather avoid.
Unlearning unhealthy ways of acting and re-acting and learning Christlike, emotionally healthy ways, of relating to each other takes effort on our part as we co-operate and participate in the work the Spirit seeks to do in our lives.
This Sunday
This Sunday we will explore why growing in emotional health is important if we are to be the people Jesus has called us to be, and some steps we might take to become more emotionally healthy.
See you then.
Brodie
Fyi – McCaig’s Tower is not built with Drumvargie stone but with granite from Bonawe quarry on the north shore of Loch Etive. The white weeping stains on the tower are from the mortar rather than the stone.