A confession: I’m not normally a fan of TED talks (especially the religious ones), but every non-fan ought to at least live with the possibility of making an exception every now and then:
‘The mystery of grace is that God loves Henry Kissinger and Vladimir Putin and me exactly as much as He or She loves your new grandchild. Go figure. The movement of grace is what changes us, heals us and heals our world. To summon grace, say, “Help,” and then buckle up. Grace finds you exactly where you are, but it doesn’t leave you where it found you. And grace won’t look like Casper the Friendly Ghost, regrettably. But the phone will ring or the mail will come and then against all odds, you’ll get your sense of humor about yourself back. Laughter really is carbonated holiness. It helps us breathe again and again and gives us back to ourselves, and this gives us faith in life and each other. And remember — grace always bats last’.
‘Grace always bats last’! Well said Anne Lamott.
jasongoroncy.com 
“The mystery of grace is that God loves Henry Kissinger and Vladimir Putin and me exactly as much as He or She loves your new grandchild.”
One has to be very careful here, but might it just be possible to say that God loves x more than y to the extent the x’s capacity to receive God’s love is greater than y’s. Isn’t this close to Edwards’ understanding of heavenly reward? And might this help us to make sense of the status of the beloved disciple?
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I may be misreading you, and I’m not wishing to go in to bat for every jot and tittle in Lamott’s talk, but I don’t think that the statement in itself necessarily precludes the notion of divine discrimination along the lines you seem to be suggesting; although wouldn’t that occasion the need to distinguish (at least linguistically or informally) between something like ontology, epistemology, and psychology?
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