Welcome again to another week on Things Unseen.

This week I want to think with you about what I'm going to call soul shapes.

I suspect you could look through many volumes of systematic theology and not find a section

headed soul shapes.

And for all I know, you might be able to look through every Christian book you own and still

not find a reference to soul shapes.

So what am I talking about here?

Well, it's just a slightly idiosyncratic way of thinking about ourselves

and the challenges we face as individuals, sometimes challenges we don't even recognize. The idea

actually came to me one day when I was thinking about one of our children whose calling is

in the field of psychiatry, forensic psychiatry.

Of course, she doesn't talk to me about her patients, some of whom, incidentally, seem to be very

sick physically and mentally, and some who have been profoundly abused and come from very

deprived backgrounds.

But it so happens that when our daughter was young,

she was a great doodler. Maybe if she hadn't become a physician, she might have got a job as a

syndicated cartoonist. And this gave me the rather whimsical idea. Maybe we could write a book

together on spiritual conditions entitled Soul Shapes and How God

Reshapes Them.

She could draw a series of illustrations of souls that are bent out of shape, sick, distorted,

caricatures of course, to make the point as visually vivid as possible.

And then we could write on how the gospel reshapes us to the new norm, namely our Lord Jesus

...