03/22/2026
CASE 001: The 278-year-old cold case
Deep in the night of March 21st, the first day of Spring 1748, somewhere in the North Atlantic, the world was about to change. A 22-year-old slave trader, on the run from God for more than a decade, stood tied to the mast of his ship, battered by a ferocious hurricane. In the darkness of that night, perched between life and death he finally, after a thousand excuses, cried out to God for mercy. That one moment of grace altered history. That boy would return as a man, a man of conviction. John Newton would become one of the world’s first whistleblowers. As a pastor and a writer he blew the lid off the slave trade, exposing what it really was and his part in it. Grace turned his humiliation into a cry for freedom, and his song, Amazing Grace would go on to become perhaps the most loved song in history.
This story, which was the subject of Amazing Grace on Broadway (2015) has been inspiring people for nearly 300 years. The grace that John Newton experienced and which propelled the rest of his life, didn't add up. It was an anomaly, a fracture in the fabric of normal expectations. Why would God ever use someone so wretched? Is God still doing it today? Is this rift in reality still open?
This Palm Sunday, I am bringing together the two halves of my life, as police officer/investigator and Broadway storyteller to reopen the case of the oldest supernatural mystery in the universe…the mystery of grace.
Stay tuned!
Christopher Smith, The Grace Detective
