It may interest readers of this blog to know that my webmaster, John Miller, and I never met until last week. Technology has reached the place where people around the world can collaborate on projects without ever coming together. John has appreciated my work and reached out to me about five years ago offering to help me develop more of a web presence than I could have accomplished with my technical savvy alone (pretty limited!). He did the design of the site and has set up the daily devotionals, the store, and my ability to blog and connect with all of you. While things have probably not gone viral to the extent that John had hoped, we do have an average of 150 or so solid hits every day from people all around the world.

Well, last week it finally happened. On a short trip to the Midwest, John and I were finally able to connect, along with his delightful son, daughter-in-law and grandchild. We spent several precious hours together and had the opportunity to brainstorm a little for the future. John’s dream is a major presence on Facebook, which is challenging since I have been resistant to that idea from the beginning. Facebook is all about connection with people and I have had way too many connections with people to manage comfortably, well before Facebook ever existed. But we came up with an exciting idea that I think I could manage when the public meetings I am now holding in Calimesa California are finished (that will be in May of 2012). Those meetings are ongoing at a pace of about two per month and each meeting requires about ten hours of preparation. So the completion of those meetings should free up a little time for new ventures.

What got me excited was the idea of a Day to Day Commentary on the Book of Revelation that would be posted on Facebook each day. I have been studying and teaching Revelation for more than thirty years but have never put a verse by verse commentary together. (Those who would like to own such a commentary might be interested in the work of my student, Ranko Stefanovic, Revelation of Jesus Christ, available from Andrews University Press). I would start with verse one and write a paragraph or two each day about that verse until I had covered all the angles I am aware of. Then I would move to verse two and do the same and so on through all 404 verses of the book. At three posts per verse (it could be a lot more for some), it would take more than three years to complete, and I suspect it will take a lot longer than that. But better to be late than to never try. Let me know what you think of this plan.

A related idea that we came up with was extracting the best sentence or summary from each Facebook post and putting it out on Twitter each day for those who like to follow that. I still have no idea how one would do that, but John knows such things and working together it just might work. Are any of you Twitter followers or producers? Would either of these ideas be personally useful to you? It sounds like it could be fun and I might never produce a commentary any other way, so let’s see what happens moving forward!