Take a lesson from the man from Glad (he wears a white suit!)

I had an interesting conversation with my brother Chris today. For those of you who don't know, he is my older brother, but not my oldest brother. Currently he (almost) resides in Tofu...I mean, Tofield, Alberta as a pastor, and when he is not busy burning down churches, he is working on sermons that are really quite impacting. At least to me.
Our talk today mostly centred around grace. I have been really struggling lately, trying to get back to a place where I can get myself right with God, where I can live my life in a way to be used by Him. And then Chris comes along and tells me that I probably should be concentrating more on God than on fixing myself (I am going to throw out an apology/disclaimer. He has thought about this much more than I have and is infinitely more capable at the moment of explaining this. However, I will soldier on and try to get my heart across. Any major mistakes, I'm sure he'll correct me on later). But it wasn't just concentrating on God that he told me to do. His phrasing was "cling to God".
This past month, I feel like I've just become totally numb, unable to be affected by crap any more. Everytime I screw up, I seem to just shrug and ignore the problem. I think that this is an end result of guilt that has been hammering away at me for much longer than I care to think. As I despair, I give up ever working my way back into the graces of God. But I don't have to, which is good, because I would never make it anyway.
God accepts us by grace, and grace alone. No one is good enough. No one. Ever. Mother Theresa wasn't good enough, and she was way better than I am.
Two things really struck me in what Chris talked about. First, the fact that God can and will use me even if I'm struggling and falling particularly hard. I don't have to be perfect before He will do something wonderful in and with my life. Too often I get stuck in trying to re-order my head and my heart before I go to Him, when all He really wants is for me to crawl to Him on my hands and knees, no matter how broken.
Secondly, it is God who does the work, really. He works to change my heart even as he works to change the world. Whatever we do is not going to work, we can't make ourselves right before Him. And that is where the grace really kicks in. He embraces me, flaws and all.
The grace of God is the only thing that saves us. I have to learn to cling to that grace at all times, no matter how good or how bad things are. It's not really the easiest thing to do, and frankly it takes longer than I want to wait.
The funny thing is, I always want to take away the sin before I get to God. But if I cling to Him and let Him change me, then he will take away the desire to sin. Chris gave me a verse in Philippians that talks about God working on the desires that we have, or something like that. I forget the verse, but what it was saying was that God is be the only one who can change our hearts. No matter how hard we try, we can do nothing.
At this point in my life, I thought that I had heard everything there was to hear about this sort of thing. Shows I was wrong. I may have heard the words before, and I have even heard and understood (at least mostly) the idea of grace, but I have never quite looked at it like this before. Not even the idea of needing God's grace alone, but the idea of clinging to that grace in such a ferocious manner. Cling to it like your life depends on it. Cling to it and let Him work on the rest. The grace of God is the only life preserver that can actually preserve life.
As an addendum, let me say that we should not just live our lives as though nothing matters, that we are going to be forgiven no matter what. The book of James clearly speaks to the falsehood of that, telling us in no uncertain terms that if we are living in God's grace, then we are not only not going to want to do bad things, but we are going to want to do good works. Also, in another book (my recall is a bit fuzzy, sorry)(probably Romans somewhere), Paul talks about not doing whatever we want to do just because we are/will be forgiven. But if you truly live in the grace of God, and really love Him, then the desires to do bad will melt away. It may take some time, but I suppose it's worth the wait. I aim to find out.