I find some congruent overlap with your perspective yet again.
. . . though I am convinced that SALVATION is by Faith alone.
Well, make it by Grace alone, and I'm on board.
I keep finding myself using the 'vaccination' image. You get the vaccination. Your 'sensoria' are only about the moment - usually an "OW!" (It may be relevant to point out here that in one of the rabies series I didn't even feel the needle. It was so very fine and the nurse placed it just right.)
But the vaccination considered comprehensively is not just the moment of injection. In ways utterly beyond our control or willing (so far as we know) it starts a series of processes the end result of which is -- well, how about THAT? -- the ability to resist evil!
So our subjective experience is one thing. The objective reality of grace entering our lives and rearranging the furniture is another, and sometimes (always?) it's quite disproportionate to the experience.
Of course, I have no recollection of being Baptized. I DO have recollections of a VERY carnal life and mind, at war with a desire, an itch that would not leave me alone, to find what we technically refer to as the "Great Hoo Hoo in the Sky."
So for about 22 years, from splashing (ahem "affusion") to the moment when I realized that when it says Christ came for sinners it was talking about MOI (not that I didn't know I was a sinner, just that I didn't know He came for ME too!), I have to say it was like the itch at the vaccination site, or maybe a litle sense of strangeness.
(Usually after one or other of the 5 vaccine shots one feels a little "'flu-y" for a day or two.)
And, of course, even after the "Are YOU talkin'a ME?" moment, there was plenty to be done in and through me -- and there still is.
But you know what? Whether God does it all or somehow with my cooperation (and HOW could I cooperate if He did not enable me to? [Hint: I couldn't]) I don't really care. It's just pick up foot, move forward, put foot down.
He may make my feet like hind's feet in somebody else's eyes. In mine, they are lead.
E pur, se muove! And the glory is God's. What would I do with glory, for crying out loud?