Long Time, No Write

The baby's asleep. The two women in our home are too. Not only is the house quiet, but our town has been unusually quiet for the past two nights, as well. If light made noise, that huge full moon setting in the west would have us all awake and grouchy. Well, I am used to being awake at 5:00 AM, so I wouldn't be grouchy I guess. Funny how in trying to make writing interesting, the facts get switched around a bit.

I realized this morning looking at that moon through the bared branches of late autumn, that it has been nearly a month since I have written anything for the blog. I don't have an essay for here this morning either. I decided to simply give a glimpse into what is happening with my writing thoughts.

I have spent time selecting old posts to consider for use in a small book--devotional maybe-- about walking in the spirit. I have rewritten several into (hopefully) a more useful form for a book format. This began to push me into a corner. I didn't want to invest much time in rewrites that I had not considered well the final putting together thereof. The whole needs a flow, a focus theme that builds insight into the topic. Or so I am thinking. I spent some time searching for an organizing framework for the whole work, which wasn't time at the keyboard but was time in these quiet morning hours thinking over the finish. Knowing where you are going is useful to getting there, though from a creative standpoint, not absolutely necessary. Sometimes the creative process discovers its own path and end--like a walk in the woods!

In the process I found myself doing a Bible study on holiness. Searching with Crosswalk.com tools, I identified 118 occurrences of words that are translated one of four ways: holiness, righteousness, sanctification, and godliness. That caused me to wonder about other words.

Here are the current results:

God 1170
Jesus = 948
Christ =496
father = 340 (many of these are about an earthly father--didn't read to sort that out)
spirit = 319
Holy Spirit = 92, so possibly 227 times of just the word spirit
love = 184
hope = 68
faith = 228
peace = 88
joy =68
devil/satan =65
evil = 98
sin = 94
I have tried several other "meaty" words with direct spiritual meaning looking for a large number of mentions. Nothing I can think of compares to these. Any ideas?

Obviously I am excluding prepositions, conjunctions and common nouns like day, night, man, or woman. Also, searching in the NASB for hell, abyss, lake of fire and outer darkness was about 30 mentions together.

Suggest some words for me you think may have multiple mentions in the NT and are key to a "spiritual" understanding. It would be helpful for me!