(Photo: “Word Cloud” of the New Testament)
Earlier this year, I was experimenting with Wordle.net; a pet project of Jonathan Feinberg of IBM Research (and, of all things, former drummer of They Might Be Giants) to create “word clouds.” A word cloud is visualization of the frequencies of words used in a given document. It was quite interesting to use famous documents or websites to see what frequent words appeared.

Of course, it was normally very predictable… plug in copy of the New Testament and what are the top words? “God”, “Jesus”, “Christ”, “Lord” … just what you might expect. But there were still a fair share of little surprises as well. Try the site and see for yourself.

Later as I was showing the site to a friend, I started thinking about how we naturally create our a kind of word clouds when we deal with others. Think about people you know… how would you describe each of them? Sports Fan? Connoisseur? Movie Critic? Outdoors Adventurist? Bookworm? Now, outside of watched them in action, most likely you came to these conclusions about them by what they talked about most.

Jesus said in Luke 6:45, “The good man out of the good treasure of his heart brings forth what is good; and the evil man out of the evil treasure brings forth what is evil; for his mouth speaks from that which fills his heart.” (See James 3 as well)

What comes out of your mouth? If it was all gathered and tallied, what does your “word cloud” look like?