On Having Or Being Souls

A few days ago, I heard one person tell another "You are a kind soul." My first thought was that that wasn't quite correct. A person has a soul, not is a soul, right?

People often use the terms "soul" and "spirit" synonymously. We know that we lived as spirits before we were born. We were spirits, but then we got bodies. Spirits don't have bodies, so what are we now?

As it turns out, we were and are and will be souls. LDS.org speaks of the term soul as being used to describe people in many stages of their eternal existence, including the stage in which we are now, having both a spirit and an eternal body.

I wonder, though, if it's more accurate to say that we are spiritual beings that have bodies or that we're physical beings that have spirits (or souls). I'm inclined to think that we are physical beings who have souls, because that's how people generally describe it,  but is that really the way it is? If we lived as spirits before we gained bodies and we'll continue to live as spirits without bodies after our bodies die and before our resurrections, then wouldn't it make sense to say that we are spirits (or souls)?

Physical bodies seem to be a temporary part of our identities. Eventually, we'll be resurrected and our bodies will become permanent parts of us, but until then, our bodies seem not to be a defining part of who we are. Perhaps it is that we are souls that have bodies, and not the other way around.

This is all somewhat confusing to me, partly because there are multiple definitions of "soul" and partly because people usually talk about people as having spirits rather than as being spirits that have bodies. I suppose that, when we cross over into the spirit world, using the correct phrasing will feel more natural. Then, we won't be people with spirits. We will be spirits that don't have bodies anymore. Things will get complicated again at the resurrection, of course, but hopefully, by then, we'll have learned enough about what we are that we'll be able to talk about ourselves with the proper terms.

Until then, I'm going to try to remember that we either are souls/spirits that have bodies or that we are souls, with "souls" meaning "combinations of spirits and bodies." It'll be difficult to keep it all straight, especially when most of the world seems to have gotten it backwards, but I'll try. It still feels more natural to say that we have souls than to say that we are souls, but feeling natural doesn't make something right. I'm sure I'll get it right eventually.