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 recognise. 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 her 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 Christ. Well, since I don't think we're ever

likely to write that book I thought maybe we could reflect on that theme for a week on

things unseen. So this week we're thinking about soul shapes. But first of all we need

to think about what we're talking about when we speak about the soul.

Think back to Genesis 2 verse 7. In the Old King James version that's translated the

Lord God farmed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath

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