John answered, “A person cannot receive even one thing unless it is given him from heaven. You yourselves bear me witness, that I said, ‘I am not the Christ, but I have been sent before him.’ The one who has the bride is the bridegroom. The friend of the bridegroom, who stands and hears him, rejoices greatly at the bridegroom’s voice. Therefore this joy of mine is now complete. He must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:27-30).

After the past couple days’ worth of shout outs from friends in the blogosphere (I can't provide you with links because I don't know how to make a link link from within the body of this post), and after I sent a few dozen email to whomever I could think of, complete with links to the above mentioned shout outs, (an embarrassing display of shameless self-promotion on my part, I now admit), I asked the Lord for a word to help me get back to right size. My evil twin, Ego, has a rather fat head to begin with, so I decided he needed something to focus on besides those blogs to keep his head from exploding!

Instead of a Scripture passage to claim as a “power verse,” and rather than pointing me to an episode of ego deflation in the life of one of the saints, our Blessed Lord gave me instead a poem by Emily Dickinson to prayerfully ponder.

I'm nobody! Who are you?

Are you nobody, too?

Then there's a pair of us -- don't tell!

They'd banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!

How public, like a frog

To tell your name the livelong day

To an admiring bog!

So today I'm back to practicing being a Nobody for Christ. May I decrease that He might increase (cf. John 3:30).

And all God’s people said... AMEN!