'Every addiction is a counterfeit dependency' 🧐😮 Why did I write that down? What was my thought process? Why didn't I remember it? Or find that little note sooner? I have no idea. But it hasn't been far from my mind since I found that note a couple weeks ago. Every addiction is a counterfeit dependency -- it weedles its way into a heart and mind and will and props itself up as a false god. It raises itself up against the knowledge of God, muzzles and shackles His Spirit, sears and silences conscience, and displaces the Son of God in our affections. It takes us captive to the law of sin. Addiction is the spirit of lawlessness. Addiction is the spirit of antichrist

(my trademark work, inspired by the Hellroaring Plateau, which rises opposite the Beartooth Pass in Southern Montana) I. Come, tread the heights of Hellroaring, my friend, look upon the vast expanse of mountain crags marching crest on crest, an ocean's waves carved in stone by ice and snow, and mend your finite self as they lend their strength. Unmitigated power, condescending, begs you stride the alpen tundra with little legs ever too short no matter their length; test your mettle, seek and find a sanity absconded from the world of fragile minds that hide in light and do not know their vanity. Tread Hellroaring, know but wind and silence; trade pride of soul for spirit-driven wind and know the small expanse: your humanity. II. To embrace and know the small is your quickening; grasp as a babe for wanted, needed food, find yourself a child where a man once stood. Summit on summit, the mind reaches for infinity and shadow dreams of future hope that we can't hope alone, no matter that we should, while faltering creations we hold as highest good and deny we are the great obscenity. Can we hope, against hope, that rarefaction inspire, That breath taken may yet give life to soul? Can any hope abide when suffering's cries reverberate within that soul like thunder on Hellroaring and return the echo of evil's howl? Will not a sane man demand the how and why? For III. Death is howling, allied Hell in outrage roars, reaping, seething, flying high its ensigns, primed for battle with its angels, men and engines; its banners furl and snap, in crimson soar high above its ramparts slick with gore where pitchmen ply all their trenchant wit and wiles, trade in grand pretensions, hawking like wares the brutalities of war. But our metaphor is not of futility, of anguish: the Lion of Judah, red in claw and tooth, by freedom, hope, and truth alluring each combatant: He loves, to thereby vanquish, and with claws yet buried deep in the corpse of Death, He stands in the gaping maw of Hell, roaring.