The Gospel According to Judas - A Handbook on Life

> From this.

They say that religion is for people who don’t want to go to Hell, and that spirituality is for people have been there. The consequence of all those drugs I took were several stints at mental institutions and some lost years, some of it just sitting in a room and talking to the cartoon people in my head. I was a failure, I was a disgrace to my family and myself. To this day, I still have some difficulty when anyone describes me or something I’ve done as “good”, or “excellent”. It goes maybe halfway to register, but the whole of the concept stays outside comprehension. In the pit where I was, there was only failure. Whatever drink I carried was bound to spill, whatever valuable thing I handled was most likely that I was to drop it.

There was once when the Lord said to me, “Work is magic.” And this made that whole experience almost worth it. Because I found from the ground up how true that proposition was. For from shame, which I deserved, out of that pit I did climb, praise the Lord. And then I saw it: in just the normal, day to day functioning of everyday things that how wonderful it was — they did not fail. They were true to action, gear upon gear one turning another and on. It was… it was magic. Work is magic. Can you conceive of it, perceive what I mean? Hopefully you might understand, and not have to pay as high a cost as I did.

So, now that you know of my past, will you write off my visions as just talk from a madman? Consider. When this, the “madness” onset, I was a drug addict on the road to wasting all the remarkable gifts that I’d been given. A rebel without a clue. What may from a certain perspective be called madness got me to accept Christ as my savior, and it was through said madness that He went and saved me, not just in the next world, but in this one. What kind of madness is that, I ask you? How fortunate do I have to be for you to consider that God has entered into my life, for real now? Yes, from time to time He has turned it upside down, but it always turns out it was to shake free all that would keep me from a better life. That is not “madness”, friend. That is Inspiration.