This is a song the TCWC is singing this weekend.  It’s one that I find myself listening to a lot these days, actually.

I don’t typically consider myself to be held back by fear.  It isn’t that I don’t HAVE fear; I have PLENTY of fear.  But I just…well, if I let being scared keep me back, I wouldn’t live where I do, I wouldn’t have married my wife, I wouldn’t go climbing three times a week, I wouldn’t do or have done any of the things that make me who I am.  Everything I cherish has only come to me after fear.  And it has always been worth it.

Even when, as Kat Perkins says, “There’s no love without heartbreak.”

I think this song has such a beautiful mix of pride and defiance and awareness of the things that do hold us back.  It reminds me that it’s okay that having courage is hard sometimes, that taking the step past the fear isn’t always going to be easy.  That it’s okay to struggle and be scared.

And that the ability to live in spite of fear, the ability to love in spite of fear, is a choice.  It isn’t often an easy one, and it isn’t often a painless one.

To live fearless is a decision a person has to make a million times a day, and it might not ever get any easier to do.  And it’s okay that it’s hard, it’s okay when it isn’t hard, and it’s okay to be proud of the times it works out right along with the times it doesn’t.

What would I do if I weren’t afraid?  Probably about what I’m doing right now.

And I’d still have bled for it, cried for it, ached and anguished for it.  And never regretted a minute of it.

Tonight, and every moment there’s a spark living in me, I’ll be fearless, too.

Thanks, Kat Perkins.