Relationship with God

I was reading my new book, can I say I love it?! I have to keep myself from reading it too fast because I want to soak in what it says, I find myself almost hanging on each word, lingering on each discussion point. Yesterday, there were a lot of good points but the one that stuck out, that I knew I was going to write about was about how our relationship with God is.
And please remember, this is how it transposed in my feable mind... not by some great scholar...

If we view God as powerful and vengeful, our relationship may be one of fear.
If we view God as a loving Father, our relationship will be one of love, and how He gives us so much love and He loves us so much, we can't even imagine.

And I guess, I feel like I am somewhere in the middle. Most of my life I feared God, He was a God of rules, and if I didn't follow those rules, I could go to hell or end up in that purgatory thing... I was never or at least I don't remember being taught that loved me. That He will forgive and it's down on the bottom of the Ocean floor, never to be seen again. It's only me who keeps bringing it up like yesterday's lunch.
Now... or at least the last couple of years, I am learning, and feeling God's love for me. And although there are rules, it's about my heart and if it's right with God, not whether or not I did something. I'm learning about Grace, (the only Grace I knew about growing up was Grace Miller who had a boat in our marina) and the magnitude of Grace and how wonderful it is. How wonderful grace is when we're in the light, and we know it's God's grace that got us there. But how grace gets us through the dark parts of our lives too. How God's grace reaches down and pulls us out of the dark. And I can only speak for myself when I stay in the dark, it's not because God's grace doesn't reach me, it's because I wallow in the dark, I don't let it reach me. I feel so... undeserving, and I grasp in my heart that grace is exactly that, undeserved, but my head is a completely different story, my head gets stuck in fear, it gets stuck in the world of "getting what we deserve" and sometimes my head and heart wrestle, and when that happens I usually cry, my head gets caught and slips up and my heart (because it belongs to God) conquers.

Luke 2:40 And the child grew and became strong; he was filled with wisdom, and the grace of God was upon him.