Your soul is the image of God in you. It is the you in God and the expression of God in you. We do not create our souls, and we do not mold them like a potter molds clay, or develop them across the canvas of life as a painter gradually reveals a work of art. We only wake them up through experience, imagination, intuition and memory. Then, if we are wise, we live from the deep messages our souls bring, and learn the difference between what helps us and what hinders us.

Over the years we receive both truthful messages and false messages from society, from our culture, from our friends and family, and from our places of faith. It is important to realise that in our mortality, we regain our sense of self in God primarily by unlearning the false messages, this is the renewal of our minds and the transformation of our hearts – the metanoia – we learn a great deal of in the New Testament. This is what Jesus means when he calls us to change, to “repent and believe the good news” (Mt. 3:2; Mk. 1:15). It’s not about changing from being bad to being good, but about letting go of superficial forms and trappings in order to take up the true essence we are in God.

What we appear to be on the outside is rarely who we are on the inside. Our forms and identities play their parts, but when it comes to living outwardly the image of God in us, that becomes a whole new story and is transformational for our self and for our life. The more ‘good’ we try to actually make our outward self, the more false and delusional we become in reality. It is in surrendering to the image of God in us, in surrendering to the soul, we begin to see and to learn the qualities that make us like Christ. It is there we can truly discover what God means when he tells us through his prophets and through his Son, “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.”