The only football analogy appropriate to the Christian faith

Contrary to popular opinion, Sudden-Death-Overtime is the only football analogy appropriate to the Christian faith and I hate it. It’s a nerve racking, a how am I ever going to get through this without everything falling into the toilet kind of thing? Part of it is just freelancing, irregular paychecks and all that. But that’s not all of it. It’s me and who I turned out to be when this faith journey thing started. I didn’t have any faith of my own, in anything or anybody. Back when, I used to hope life wouldn’t suck too much more before I got through it.
Then, as far as I can tell, God called me. Now this was not God calling out, “Oh Mike? Mike? Can you hear me?” No. This is the creator of heaven and earth and everything besides having ordained from before the beginning of time that at such and such a time that everything before has led to cause and effect circumstances leading to me having a certain kind of sight I had previously been blind to eliciting only one possible response. That kind of call.
Since answering that kind of call requires a certain amount of faith in a deity capable of, well pretty much anything, faith that this deity is good and faith that said deity has my best interest at heart. Since, as previously mentioned I had none of my own, faith must be provided. We now arrive at sudden-death- overtime, my inexhaustible ability to screw up and the use of rope.
You’ve heard the phrase “Give him enough rope and he’ll hang himself?” In my experience God is generous with his rope.
Sometimes he gives miles of it. Sometimes I’m up on the scaffold over the trap door with a noose around my neck and the man has his hand on the lever. And always God shows up and I get another shot at things. And every time He ups the ante a bit, grows my faith a little more and He’ll continue to up the ante until once and for all I finally believe He ain’t going to let me fall, I don’t have to get it all right or all figured out. All I have to do is trust in him. And every time he pulls my butt out of the fire I believe that for a while.
The problem is I’m a backslider. Truth be told, I think we’re all backsliders. He picks us up and sets us on our feet and starts us out and keeps us steady and after a little while we get comfortable walking and we start thinking we pulled ourselves up by our own boot straps and are doing things all on our own, especially here in the states with our “rugged individualism.” When I get like that He plays out more rope letting me get to a place, usually near the edge of a cliff somewhere, where I can see and hear again. But, like I said, that’s me. I don’t know if it fits for you?