He Must Increase, but I Must Decrease.

My four-year-old Theodore has a habit that makes me laugh and convicts me in the same breath.

If I mention that I'm not feeling well or have a headache, he will almost always answer, brightly and with total confidence, "Well, I don't have a headache!"

He isn't being unkind. He just hears my problem, checks his own situation, finds it perfectly fine, and reports back. My headache barely registers. His own comfort is the whole world.

It's easy to smile at that in a small child. The trouble is, we never really grow out of it. We just learn to hide it better.

The grown-up version is quieter and more polished, but it runs on the same wiring. We hear someone else's news and quietly measure it against our own. We walk into a room and wonder how we're coming across. We do something good and notice, just a little, whether anyone saw.

The self stays at the center, narrating everything, asking the same question under its breath: but what about me?

John the Baptist knew that pull from the inside. For a season, he was the one everyone came to see.

People streamed out into the wilderness to hear him preach and to be baptized. He had a following. Recognition. And he had every reason to hold onto that.

Then Jesus shows up and slowly the crowds started going to Him instead. John's own disciples came to him rattled by it, almost offended on his behalf: the One you pointed to is baptizing now, and everyone is going to Him.

You can hear what sits underneath their words. Your moment is fading. Do something.

But John wasn't threatened. He reminded them he had never been the main event. He was like the friend of the bridegroom at a wedding, never the groom himself, just the one who stands close by and is overjoyed simply to hear the groom's voice.

His gladness was never in being the center, it was in pointing to the One who is. And so he could say, without bitterness, "He must increase, but I must decrease," and mean it as joy.

I feel that same pull, in my own small way. When something I've made to point people toward God is received kindly, part of me wants to step into the frame and take a little of the credit.

That quiet tug is exactly why these devotionals carry no name. It's a guardrail for my own heart, a way to make sure that when something here meets you, the thanks has only one place to land, and it isn't me.

This is the great reversal of the Christian life, and it runs against everything we're wired for as humans.

We spend our days trying to increase: more recognition, more control, more of our own name in the room.

John points the opposite direction entirely.

Make Him bigger. Make myself smaller.

Step off center stage so the light can fall where it always belonged.

The strange mercy is that decreasing turns out not to be a loss. Being the center of your own universe is exhausting work, and you were never strong enough to carry it.

When He increases and you decrease, you finally get to set down the weight of being the main character.

You stop auditioning. You stop keeping score. You get to be small, and free, and glad to be a part of a story far bigger than your own.

Less of you was never the bad news. It's the doorway to a life that is finally, restfully, about Him.