For my husband’s 50th birthday, I created a book with encouraging notes from friends from the various seasons of our lives. Then I used WORDLE.NET to create a collage of the words used in the notes. It was really cool to see which words showed up the most as people wrote what they loved about Alan.
Recently, my friend, Diane, gave me another great idea for using WORDLE.NET. She had taken her journal and plugged it into wordle. So I just took the time to do the same. I have been journaling since 1990 so I created a wordle for each year’s journal.
Below is the image created by WORDLE.NET for my 1993 journal. The words are sized according to how many times they were used in the text. Extraneous words are eliminated. Since my journal is a place where I process my daily happenings, spiritual life, scripture and prayers, it is no surprise that God is the largest word.
What struck me as I read through the words of this year was the word “Susie” in the top right quadrant of the image. I couldn’t figure out how a woman I couldn’t remember had her name in such a large font. So I went back into the journal and searched for her name. I found a story that I had completely forgotten. I’ll share the story of Susie in the next couple of blog entries. It really is a story of God’s grace of meeting me right where I was at the time (29-years-old with a 10-month-old baby and almost three years after my spiritual life had taken on a new light).
Stay tuned…
August 1st, 2011 at 6:18 am
[...] This is a journal entry from July, 1993. This was right after Alan had been laid off from the College Ministry position where we had spent the first 8 years of our marriage. Alan did not have a new position yet, Sean was 10 months old, and it was a very unsettling time. See the related blog entry HERE. [...]