"In a scene from the movie Ironweed, the characters played by Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep stumble across an old Eskimo woman lying in the snow, probably drunk. Besotted themselves, the two debate what they should do about her:
"Is she drunk, or a bum?" Asks Nicholson.
"Just a bum. Been one all her life."
"And before that?"
"She was a whore in Alaska."
"She hasn't been a whore all her life. Before that?"
"I dunno. Just a little kid, i guess."
"Well a little kid's something. It's not a bum and it's not a whore. It's something. Let's take her in."
The two vagrants were seeing the Eskimo woman through the lens of grace. Where society saw only a bum and a whore, grace saw a "little kid," a person made in the image of God no matter how defaced that image had become."
-Philip Yancey-
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