I was sitting beside Uncle Marty, kind of shyly humming along as he played hymns on his guitar. We were in my Great Aunt Laura’s living room, the three of us.

All of Daddy’s family can sing beautifully—even he can, but don’t tell him I told you.

Suddenly, I heard myself singing out loud with them. They sang the fancy parts and I sang the plain parts, and in no time at all, we could feel God with us. I don’t know how to explain it, but if you’ve ever been in church when people who love God are singing from their hearts, the air changes. He comes in person, and your soul knows it.

We sang with the cloud of witnesses:

What can wash away my sin?

Nothing but the blood of Jesus.

What can make me whole again?

Nothing but the blood of Jesus.

And I remembered something author Brennan Manning wrote about grace. When I read the words to Uncle Marty, big tears rolled down his cheeks. He wiped them away with a chuckle, the way someone laughs when they feel loved. Glimpsing the inside of God’s heart does that to us, because we find ourselves there, permanently welcome in the very place we would expect to be condemned.

When I first heard about the grace of God, it was the Good News like I’d never heard it before. So I set out toward what I thought was grace and walked in the wrong direction until I was lost. Grace that doesn’t come from God will cast a spell on you.

Since people are like pendulums, when we realize something’s not quite right, we swing too far the other way, which is what I did. I became suspicious of grace and ran from it. My idea of God began to look stern and furious again, and the only safe place to hide from a furious Father is in His rules.

But we can’t keep the rules. That’s the awful paradox of religion.

Just when we’ve been kind of good for a little while, we turn obnoxiously self-righteous. The undeserved, un-earnable gift of God is reduced to “the best decision I ever made.”

Brennan was right about grace. It’s for people who know better, and people who don’t. It’s for the lowdown, the mess-makers, the want-to-do-betters. The mistake-repeaters, the too far gone, the ones tricked into thinking they’ve sold their soul.

Anyone who needs mercy. Whosoever asks for it.

If Heaven kept time, today would be Uncle Marty’s third day there. He was like me, in deep debt to a Savior who will have mercy on him—A God who will look into our eyes in the moment of judgment, searching for only one thing: Jesus.

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“Because salvation is by grace through faith, I believe that among the countless number of people standing in front of the throne and in front of the Lamb, dressed in white robes and holding palms in their hands (see Revelation 7:9), I shall see the prostitute from the Kit-Kat Ranch in Carson City, Nevada, who tearfully told me that she could find no other employment to support her two-year-old son. I shall see the woman who had an abortion and is haunted by guilt and remorse but did the best she could faced with grueling alternatives; the businessman besieged with debt who sold his integrity in a series of desperate transactions; the insecure clergyman addicted to being liked, who never challenged his people from the pulpit and longed for unconditional love; the sexually abused teen molested by his father and now selling his body on the street, who, as he falls asleep each night after his last ‘trick’, whispers the name of the unknown God he learned about in Sunday school.

‘But how?’ we ask.

Then the voice says, ‘They have washed their robes and have made them white in the blood of the Lamb.’

There they are. There we are – the multitude who so wanted to be faithful, who at times got defeated, soiled by life, and bested by trials, wearing the bloodied garments of life’s tribulations, but through it all clung to faith.

My friends, if this is not good news to you, you have never understood the gospel of grace.”

~ Brennan Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel