Okay, folks. I’ve been watching my blog’s follower count creep up and have been thinking that it might be a clever gimmick to reward Follower #100 with their choice of my published books.

I thought I’d have plenty of time to think this through, but yesterday my follower count suddenly shot up to 99. We’re on the very cusp of hitting the centennial!

So here’s my offer (limited to readers who live in the United States) —

Become Follower #100 on my blog and win a free copy of one of my published books:

Little One Lost: Living with Early Infant Loss

A Month of Sundays: 31 Meditations on Resting in God

or the student workbook, Not My Own: Discovering God’s Comfort in the Heidelberg Catechism. You can view the book’s front and back cover as well as the first two lessons in this PDF.

If you are Follower #100 and you live in the United States, I’ll mention your screen name in a comment on this post, asking you to friend me on Facebook so you can send me a private message with your US postal address. The book will be sent out as soon as possible; I hope within the next week or two. While I deeply appreciate my international readers, I am not able to mail a book to an address out of my own country.

Those of you who make the effort to be #100, but miss that honor have the reward of knowing how much I value each and every follower.

The best advice I ever heard about blogging was this: Every hit is a real person.

In this day of computer generated search engines, I’m not sure that’s entirely true, but I do think about all those numbers as more than simply statistics–I think of them as real people who somehow, somewhere, find my blog.

That guides what I write here and I’d just like to say: Thanks for reading!