Blessed is the man You choose, and cause to approach You…. Psalm 65:4
This is a nice summary of the paradox of God’s grace and of human free will. God chooses, He causes, but it is we ourselves who do the approaching. I am not a Calvinist, but neither am I one of those for whom the idea of God’s election is problematic.
I do believe that from the point of view of our life as it is lived God’s election is retrospective rather than prospective. That is, God doesn’t normally tell someone “You are one of the elect; I will not let you go no matter what you do.” There may be a few out there who are like that, but I know that I'm not one of them.
I know from looking at my own heart that it's all too easy to escape the grace of God; to slip into a gradual but increasing hardening against Him through disobedience. From observing others’ spiritual outcomes I also know that it is possible to once enjoy the signs and experiences of grace and later to enter a state of spiritual amnesia so deep that those experiences may just as well have never happened; or if they did, they happened to another person.
These things teach me that my identity in Jesus Christ is something to be held on to, to be grasped tightly as a pearl of great price, and not to be held loosely or negligently.
However, I also believe that everyone who is ultimately saved will be able to look back at their life later and say “God was working in me here” or “He had His hand on me there” or “I wandered away from Him but He never let me go and finally brought me back to Himself”. We will see God’s grace behind everything we did to approach Him or seek Him.