If you show up to the gates of heaven completely whole, I kind of doubt you’ll be let inside.

I know that sounds pretty awful, because what kind of God doesn’t want all of you, exactly as you are? “Be yourself,” we tell our kids. “If someone expects you to change to be their friend, you don’t want to be that person’s friend.”

I am fascinated by minor Gospel characters. These people — the rich young man, the adulterous woman, the teachers at the temple — share the stage with Jesus only briefly. They bear passing but powerful witness to crucial moments of his earthly ministry. They breathe the air he breathes. They hear the sound of his voice. Some of them feel the touch of his skin. And then they go on with their lives and disappear into obscurity. They become just another one of us.

When I’m interviewing people for my job as a staff writer at an archdiocesan newspaper, I like to ask them this question: at the end of your life, when you meet God, what do you want to hear Him say?

I’ve gotten a lot of interesting answers.

One of the most touching YouTube videos I’ve ever seen is one in which a deaf woman receives new technology to heal her hearing. She hears her husband's voice for the first time — and her own, too — and bursts into tears of overwhelming joy. It must have been like an immovable wall between her and her loved ones came tumbling down.

On November 28, 1981, Alphonsine Mumureke was in the dining room at her high school in Kibeho, a small village in southwestern Rwanda. She heard a voice. It was a woman, veiled and beautiful. Alphonsine asked her who she was. “I am the Mother of the Word,” answered the woman.

It was the first appearance of Our Lady of Kibeho, who would return to visit Alphonsine and two of her schoolmates over the course of the next eight years. She left with them an urgent call for repentance, along with a prophecy of the Rwandan genocide that would come to fruition in the next decade.