Karl Of Jesus

A separate twitter account, twitter etiquette, and the whole person.

For a while i’ve wanted to tweet more about my spiritual life, yet I haven’t wanted to bombard the stereotypical twitter follower who follows me mostly for geek reasons.

Making this decision has been an interesting process because one of the things I love about twitter is the insights you get into people, seeing more of the “Whole Person” - for better or worse, through the variety of tweets they have. You learn things about their family, worldview, humanity and other hobbies that you wouldn’t through many normal geek channels.

Twitter Etiquette I suppose is quite complicated given the public nature, and the various reasons people follow you, and unfollow you etc, but as a follower i’ve learnt that a huge conversation between 2 people shouldn’t get to that stage and go Direct Message before then, and that you end up unfollowing people who tweet a lot about things that aren’t relevant to you.

As a Christian though I don’t want to segregate my life into different buckets, the public and the private, for I am a whole person, and my religion and worldview are part of all of that. I am committed that along with the geeky stuff, the different parts of me - quirkiness, family, faith, humor and even a little bit of politics gets expressed from time to time in my Geekstream yet the majority of my followers are following me for purely geekish reasons, in particular PowerShell reasons.

So i’ve set up a new @karlofjesus twitter account to complement my geekier @karlprosser . There is not going to be a total seperation of Church and Code however, its just that @karlprosser will only see that in moderation.

on the same note there will be two tumblr miniblogs http://karlofjesus.prossertribe.com and http://geekkarl.prossertribe.com

and eventually there will be a a blog other than my geeky one at http://www.karlprosser.com/coder that will bring in the whole stream - the spiritual, the geek and the family man.

I’ll be contacting the people I know that are friends mostly for spiritual reasons and invite them to the new stream.

Why the Name?

 While my main Spiritual Blog is called “Christ, Liberty and the pursuit of Holiness” I’ve struggled to find a small name for my spiritual twitter account, and my mini-blog and other such online identities.

Karl Of Jesus, does sound a little odd in modern English, and might be misinterpreted by some that I, a mere mortal, might be claiming some sort of special or exclusivity on the Son of God, but that is not the case.

However I wanted something that in a few words, communicated my worldview, my identity , and the purpose of it. I believe this does the job very well as OF has a lot of richness to it.

Here are two Dictionary references to give a backgroup

The original Webster Dictionary http://1828.mshaffer.com/d/word/of

 http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/of

“Used to indicate derivation, origin, or source” : Jesus is where I come from as He is my creator, the source of every breath of my life (both in sustaining me as a human being, even before salvation, and the source of my spiritual life , the bread of life that sustains me. “indicate derivation”reflects that I’m a human being that is made in the image of God -Imago Deo (despite being marred by sin)

“Used to indicate cause, motive, occasion, or reason” : Though this would be a great nuance to meaning, and it is true that Jesus is my reason, this just doesn’t work grammatically as it really needs to relate to a verb, but still Jesus is, my cause, my motive and my reason.

“Used to indicate material, component parts, substance, or contents” :  The mystery of the body of Christ.

“Characterized or identified by”,”used to indicate apposition or identity”:  My identity IS , or at least should be further, rooted in Jesus.

“Belonging or connected to” : I am bought by His blood, and am connected to the true vine.

“Centering on; directed toward” : Enough said there, being Godcentric should be my total focus.

“Set aside for; taken up by” : So much goodness in there, I could spend a week just going into that sanctification.

So though I may be “Karl of Napier, New Zealand”, I am so much more “Karl of Jesus” as a sojourner and exile on earth, with Christ being my true home, my true identity,  and my true sabbath.