I was watching American football late on a Sunday night. You have to be a real fan, dedicated, driven, to stay up as late as games come in sometimes here in Bermuda.

I settled down to watch because of three things. I love American football, both college and NFL games, and, besides the drama of the athletic competition itself, there were two stories being played out on the field last night. One of the stories was high profile, but the other was not so much. One was about an offensive lineman and the other about a third-string quarterback.

The Baltimore Ravens were playing the Pittsburgh Steelers. At offensive tackle was Michael Oher – Michael Oher of the "The Blind Side" fame. He is the real life person given theatrical life in a recent movie starring Sandra Bullock. He is a rookie this year and doing quite well in a starting position. His job is to protect the quarterback from defensive players trying to take him down.

I actually learnt about Michael Oher because of the movie. My wife and I decided to take in that movie recently at the Speciality Cinema and Grill.

Now, for me, that place will always be "The Little Theatre." When I first saw it, I thought no place had been so aptly named.

The new owners invested in modernising the place, and they've done a great job with it. There are electronic billboards depicting coming attractions.

The sound system is great and the seating has been updated. It is still a little theatre, but it feels like quality as well. Football teams usually have a first string quarterback who takes all the snaps and functions as the director, the captain, the organisational hub for the offensive team on the field.

That person has to be able to read what the defence is likely to do by seeing how they line up across from him, and he has to make quick decisions.

Sometimes he has to tell other players where they should be, because the plays, what the team is going to do when the centre hikes the ball back to the quarterback, are very complex, often leading to confusion.

These plays are like choreographed dance routines in which the dancers purposefully run into people on the opposite dance squad and ultimately jump on the man carrying the football in order to keep him from "dancing" his way to other end of the field.

Anyway, the quarterback is an important position, and each team has at least two of them, because they tend to get banged up a bit.

A reminder of that is how "The Blind Side" starts; it shows the career-stopping injury of a Hall of Fame quarterback, Joe Theisman, during one particular game in which a defensive player, Lawrence Taylor, jumped on him and broke his leg.

So, prior to this particular game that I was watching, the Steeler's first string and the Steeler's second string quarterbacks were both injured.

Good thing they had drafted Dennis Dixon to be their third string quarterback, and that is the second story.

Dennis Dixon was a star quarterback on his high school team in central California. His stats for yardage and winning ball games were remarkable. Coming out of high school, he was highly recruited by college teams, but he selected the University of Oregon with the goal of leading them to a national championship. He had mixed success in making a consistent start because of competition from another quarterback on the team, but when his senior year arrived, the job had become all his.

He lead the team to a second place rating in the national standings, and his dream of playing for a national championship seemed within grasp when he tore his anterior cruciate ligament (one of four major ligaments that stabilise the knee) and was sidelined and through playing football for the remainder of the year.

In June 2007, he graduated with a degree in sociology and a 3.27 grade point average, and he had surgery for his torn ACL.

In the 2008 NFL draft, the Pittsburgh Steelers took Dennis in the fifth round, and he became the third quarterback on their depth chart.

Fast forward to November 29, 2009.

On the road, playing in a game with playoff implications, against the Baltimore Ravens, a passionate rival to the Steelers and a team noted for its aggressive defence, Dixon would be tested.

Would he be able to function fast enough? Would he be given a chance to pass and to run, or would the coach only send in plays in which he would hand off to a running back? Did the Steelers have any chance at all?

He would, the coach would, and the Steelers almost won the game. Dennis indeed handed off the ball, but he also passed for significant yardage and ran the ball in for a touchdown himself.

His only flaw was an interception in overtime, which, unfortunately led to the Ravens game winning field goal.

I love stories like that of Michael Oher and Dennis Dixon, because they illustrate resilience, heart, and what was once depicted in a movie starring John Wayne-True Grit.

In the New Testament, Jesus' brother, James, wrote, "Consider it all joy, my brethren, when you encounter various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance. And let endurance have its perfect result, so that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing."

We each dance across the playing field we've been given. Michael Oher and Dennis Dixon encountered "trials," difficulties, disappointments, disadvantages, challenges, and hardships.

They are still encountering them. As long as we have life, each one of us encounters them, and the trick is to see them as opportunities for growth, so that we might become just a little bit more perfect.

There were two stories being told last night that I wanted to watch in addition to the drama of athletic competition, but really, there are countless stories being told every day all around us.

Sometimes we are privileged to be able to watch, but most often we are caught up in the struggle of dancing our ways through our own stories even as the choreography of life moves us along.