funeral for a twitter name...

I know that the presses stopped the other night... Bryan Williams did a double-take... Walter Cronkite probably shivered... all because I changed my social media presence from alienwanderer to jasonbterry. 

Obviously, I couldn't exaggerate more, but a couple of people have asked me about it, so let me explain why.

First, the easy part: I changed everything to jasonbterry because I'll always be me. Regardless of where God takes me in this life (barring any potential induction into a witness protection program) that name will always work for me. Being 32, I have a better understanding of the fact that the big thing that God is teaching me right now is not likely to be the overarching theme of my life and learning in 10 years... let's go ahead and go with something timeless... wait, that's weird... my name isn't so amazing that it's timeless, but it's not going to change over time. (And I thought this was gonna be the easy part...)

So why get away from alienwanderer? First, a look at why I went with it, in the first place... from my old blogsite...

the whole “alienwanderer” thing is about our lack of belonging in this world and the journey through which we wander with God as our lead, one step at a time.

While I certainly still strive to have God as my leading beacon, frankly, I've grown to reject the idea that Christians don't have a place in this world, that we don't belong here. Now, before you sharpen your pitchfork, let me explain...

But according to his promise we are waiting for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells.
II Peter 3:13

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away
Revelation 21:1-4

I tell you this, brothers: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. Behold! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed. For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality. When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written:
 “Death is swallowed up in victory.”
 “O death, where is your victory?
O death, where is your sting?”
 The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ
I Corinthians 15:51-56 

There is myriad of other scriptures I could list, but this is sufficient to get the conversation started. The bottom line is this:

I have come to understand the teaching of scripture to be that evil has stolen the world from us and from God. He made the earth and everything in it and declared "it is good" (except for man being alone, which he promptly remedied... that's another train of thought, altogether). Then, evil made its way in through the fruit of the Tree of the Fruit of the Knowledge of Good and Evil (anyone else think we could've come up with a longer name for that?...such a pitiful effort)... through Adam and Eve's sin in the Garden...

The Garden of Eden... That perfect place where there was full-on communion between God and man.

Everything was right in that place. It was Heaven on Earth in the truest sense of the term, wasn't it? What more could God or man ask for than to be together, fully? But all of that was stolen when sin/evil entered the world through man. Then, scripture tells us what followed...

The Tabernacle...

The Temple...

God, Himself, embodied as a man, Jesus...

The coming of the Holy Spirit to every believer...

God has spent all this time getting closer and closer and closer... longing to be with His people, to dwell among us again... longing for the day when we can be together again as we were in the Garden. 

...And that's where we're going. 

Having redeemed our souls with the blood of Jesus, God is now in close communion with us, spiritually, through the Holy Spirit, but with Jesus' resurrection, He is poised to redeem the earth and all of creation through the coming baptism with fire. Once the Earth is redeemed, with all sin and evil forever purged from its contents, God will, again, dwell with His creation in the fullest sense. 

Our hope is great, for we are not destined to spend eternity as disembodied spirits in some detached, parallel dimension any more than Jesus was only "kinda" resurrected, merely as a spirit.  Jesus had a physical resurrected body of perfection and immortality...raised imperishable...never to die again, and we are destined for the same thing. 

The Earth is destined to put on perfection and immortality, to be imperishable, with never another occurrence of death. 

We are going back to the Garden of Eden. The New Heaven and New Earth are one in the same. God is coming back... coming back to the Garden of Eden, and the place of the Christian is with Him..."That where I am, there you may also be."

I am no alien in this place. I'm just waiting and trusting in God, that He will keep His promise to return and grant us an eternity in His presence... here... in the newly-redeemed Garden of Eden.