THE GARMENTS OF THE SOUL

You are not your thoughts, and your thoughts are not you…

Have you ever had a weird or wild thought out of nowhere and wondered, “Where did that come from?!” It doesn’t reflect who you believe yourself to be or anything you know about who you are…yet there it is. It may be passing or lingering and repeating. The passing thought comes and goes but the lingering and repeating are the ones that worry us. And what are we to do with them?

The world would have us believe we have no soul. We evolved out of plasma and mysteriously ended up sentient creatures. To the world, what we would think of as soul is just the thoughts in our heads, good or bad, happy or sad. Random or deliberate.
And as usual the church is no help here. Believing mankind to be sinful beings, they behave as though all those thoughts are our soul…and that our soul is naturally evil.

But neither imagined reality is real.
The truth is that we can’t know what the soul is, though we can know it is there. And thoughts, good or bad, happy or sad, random or deliberate are not our souls…but the garments of the soul. Our thoughts, feelings, emotions, are not merely chemicals racing around the brain either. They comprise a spiritual sort of clothes.

The way of the world encourages embracing our every thought, because it’s who we are. There’s no morality to it either. It’s all just our personal truth. And the church wants us to fight off our thoughts, because we are sinful and we should be ashamed of who we are. The one extreme belief drives us to the other. Some would believe they are their negative thoughts and rush to the church to learn to fight themselves. Others raised in the church learning to fight themselves for who they are, run to the world to embrace their every thought.
But our thoughts, feelings, and emotions are not our souls or ourselves. They are simply the clothing that our spirits wear. And like ordinary clothing, they can be changed as needed.
Like physical garments, thoughts and feelings are meant to cover and adorn us, but also serve as a manner of self expression. As some clothes are appropriate in some settings but not in others, so also with the soul. One does not wear a tuxedo to the beach nor a swim suit to a wedding. And other thoughts act like underwear - clothes that are meant to be kept private.
Thoughts too can be undersized or oversized so as to not fit us quite right. And in the same manner as regular material, our thoughts can become dirty or damaged, requiring cleaning and mending to make them wearable again.
We can also out-grow some thoughts like a child might with his or her early clothes.
So whether a random thought popped into your head or you find yourself plagued by a recurring idea that you find disturbing, know that it’s not you. It’s just the clothing of the mind. If you like it you can wear it. If you don’t you can change it.

#QuestionEverything
#GetBiblical

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Caleb Lussier

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