I was reading a remarkable blog by Jon Swanson and thinking about his community and role as a pastor and blogger and thought it would be neat to have someone with Jon’s writing skill, love of God, and abilitity to communicate his faith in a modern voice work on a project with me – something simple.

The light bulb that went off in my mind was to present to Jon and a few other friends  an idea, a great idea, to develop a following of daily readers interested in what a modern Jesus would say, 140 characters at a time.

That’s right, Jesus on twitter.

Well, that idea doesn’t sound too original, but my concept was to have a twitter account setup on the idea of “what would Jesus tweet” if he was around today – not bible quotes as we know them, but tweets in our own common language – words about life from the Son of God via twitter. I’d be happy to see those tweets – surely others would too.  It would be a great outreach effort.

Knowing that I would need more than just an idea to present to Jon, I thought I would go ahead and setup the gmail account and then the twitter account that would be needed to run this idea.

Ten minutes later I realized my idea was not so new afterall, wwjt@gmail.com was taken and so was wwjt and jesustweet on twitter.  While I could re-imagine this and come up with a new email and a new twitter account, my motivation was displaced once this reality set in.

For me, knowing that I could not (or would not) run this by myself, I hit the first dip in this idea and decided to abandon it after less than 15 minutes of conceiving it.  As mentioned in an earlier post, I’ve put my own advice to work and made the effort to unclutter my mind by working this idea out so it doesn’t consume my brainwidth – which is important for me since I have so many things bouncing around in my mind. Knowing when to quit is just as important as knowing when to stick with it.  For now, “what would Jesus tweet” has already been done so you can find me following wwjt and jesustweet looking for the next new idea!

What’s your new idea?  Did you see if it’s really a new idea, or just new to you?