Confession time.

I’ve missed a few issues. And not because I didn’t have something to say, God had plenty to show me, but I didn’t stop long enough to listen.

Instead, I let busyness and stress take the lead. I told myself I’d wait until it “clicked,” but really, I was avoiding what God had already pointed to: pride, self-judgment, laziness, all showing up in how I saw myself when things got hard.

I’ve always promised that I’d never publish an issue just to hit a deadline. That each topic would be something God had walked me through first. And this one on altars is no different. It just took longer because God had some tearing down to do in my life.

What follows is what God taught me: how false altars form, how we try to fix them ourselves, and what it looks like to let Him remove them from our lives.

Thank you for your patience and your presence. This little newsletter community means more to me than you know. Expect some surprise emails soon too, I owe you a few extra issues!

Love you all and God bless,
Addison

Moses had been gone too long.
Forty days up a mountain covered in smoke and fire. 

No word. No updates.

At first, the people waited.
Then they worried.
Then they wondered: “What if he’s never coming back?”

They’d already lost everything once.
Now the man who led them out of Egypt, the one who parted the sea, the one who made sense of the chaos… was just gone.

That’s when fear took the reins.

They found Aaron and told him the thing they didn’t dare say out loud before:

Aaron, Moses’ right-hand man, caved.
He took their jewelry, the very gold meant to be used for the construction of God’s temple, and melted it into a calf.

And after it was complete, Aaron’s words fell out like poison:

The people didn’t second-guess it.

They rose early, brought their offerings, danced and worshipped at the calf’s feet.

Fear whispered they were now responsible for their own provision.
Fear told them they were forgotten and abandoned. 
Fear drove them to build an idol to replace Yahweh…

When Survival Becomes Worship

We like to think we’d never make the same mistake as Israel.
That we’d never build something to replace God.
We do it all the time though.

It doesn’t start with defiance. It starts with pain.