Birth
4:08 am in Uncategorized by Richard Venable
Birth is an amazing thing. My wife and I had our first baby 6 months ago. One moment you have no baby, but you know the baby is alive inside of its mother. Then the baby is born, and suddenly everything is different. You can suddenly see and touch her, and start to get to know her. You fall in love instantly!
Update: A few hours after I wrote this post, my sister-in-law Heidi went into labor. 4 hours later she experienced the birth of her first baby. Amazing!
Likewise, things drastically change when you are born a second time. Jesus said, “no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again… The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.” (John 3:3, 8).
God designed births, both physical and spiritual, to be pivotal moments in time, when the world changes suddenly and permanently.
For the last two years I have been slowly working on this Biblefox project of mine. I have a pretty elaborate vision for making the site into a powerful, community Bible study tool. My vision has changed so many times during the last two years, and I have spent time developing many things that just haven’t panned out. But now here I am at this point, where I think I have a decent site set up.
Biblefox is designed to facilitate online community discussing the Bible, but I have been so slow in actually marketing it to create this community. Now I’m finally going to do just that, starting by releasing many of my tools as an open source plugin for WordPress (and BuddyPress). This is a big shift for me, as the site will stop being just a personal experiment and will hopefully be a tool that many people around the world can start to give me feedback on.
I’m praying this will be the real birth of Biblefox, where one moment Biblefox has no community and the next moment community begins to come to life. There are a lot of amazing ways you can study the Bible with an online community, and websites have so far only scratched the surface of what is possible. I’m praying Biblefox can begin to take some large steps in exploring online community Bible study.
This is an excellent post. So well-written and full of imagery and passion! To go along with the analogy, birth pains are quite painful. Sometimes, in order to bring something good into the world, we have to experience severe pain. I think you have done a lot of birth pains these past two years where you have labored hard to develop an excellent Bible study website. I am excited to see you release it and develop a great community. I enjoy using it personally and look forward to more and more people taking advantage of it.
I’m excited!
I too wanted to let you know I am excited for this community. It looks like it already is and can continue to grow into a wonderful tool for Christians around the world. I am a developer and a Christian and this site caught my eye as I surfed Buddypress looking for ways to use my God given skills to help my church. Like Hannah, I can see the passion in this post and wanted to give you some encouragement from southwest Virginia. God Bless and thank you for putting this community online.
Thanks, Andrew! If you end up using the Biblefox for WordPress plugin on your church’s site, let me know how it goes. I’m excited to be working on a project that can hopefully benefit your church and others.
In a few weeks, you’ll get to experience the BIRTH of your second child! HalleluYAH!