All Is Grace: A Ragamuffin Memoir

by Brennan Manning

Buechner said it best: I am inclined to believe that God’s chief purpose in giving us memory is to enable us to go back in time so that if we didn’t play those roles right the first time round, we can still have another go at it now.… Another way of saying it, perhaps, is that memory makes it possible for us both to bless the past, even those parts of it that we have always felt cursed by, and also to be blessed by it … what the forgiveness of sins is all about.1

frantically living for God rather than with God.