M,
When we talk of characters in stories, it is always about the need to make them live in colour and not in black and white. Life is more round than straight, more zig-zag than concentric and more random, it may seem, than logical. People are always more complex than what they appear.
No one needs to stray far to find this out. It is within our own souls. The chaos we are and can create moving from hour to hour and life to life, is a reminder of how though we can make things we can also break things. One is not the sum of our lives over the other. If we measure our bad acts against our good acts, we would fall into doubt and fear and self loathing. So we create a fiction about ourselves, a story so grand and encompassing it keeps us walking when we would be crawling at the truth of ourselves and the depths of our own depravity. Writers need more honesty than imagination. All of us suffer under the stain of imperfection. The complexity of the human soul is there, in all of us.
This is what makes Grace so important. It is that “wide road that keeps my legs from slipping”. It is the beautiful idea that the condemnation of man or woman is irrelevant in view of the love of God. And beyond that, it is the assurance that we will get better in time and be full in eternity. It is not an excuse to keep on sinning but the idea that sin can end, if you so choose. It is not embracing that life and everything, and the human soul, can be ugly, but the comfort, the everlasting consolation, that grace finds beauty in everything, even in us.