Failure is not final.

Ever have one of those moments where you keep hearing the same word over and over and over. It pops up in conversation with one person, then the next and so on? Next thing you know, you're basically eating that word for breakfast with your morning coffee?!?!

The word for me right now is FAILURE. Ick, what a scary word, huh? When I see that word, I see a dark alley and I hear the eerie suspenseful music playing in the background. My heart starts to race and I cannot even close my eyes or I'd be curled up into the fetal position.

Last week my husband asked me what I was afraid of. You see, we've got this "idea" we are considering running with - a team effort. So we've been talking about it a lot. Without a doubt, I know that I suffer from a severe case of "fear of failure." I'm a perfectionist...even though my house is a disaster. {like for real, but it's SO MUCH WORK, right?! I need to block time on the calendar to even just get it picked UP and THEN I can consider making a call to the cleaning person to come and clean it bc I'll be out of time and wiped OUT from the efforts of cleaning before cleaning.} I'm a perfectionist, even though I have zero control over some aspects of my life. I'm a perfectionist. I life in fear of failing - so therefore when a great idea presents itself, I get excited for like an hour of fantastic brainstorming {ask Corey - yesterday we had a great storm during our walk} and then BAM! - fear creeps in. I close up shop, slow the roll on the brainstorm and get so uncomfortable I have to move to walk away - move to a new environment.

This past weekend I spent 3 days immersed in a women's conference hearing from subject matter experts in the field of entrepreneurship and just plain being a bad-ass woman. Let me tell you, it was GOOD stuff, but if you look at my notes from the "own your past/future" sections, failure is a common thread. Come home from the conference - head to church on Sunday morning with the fam-bam and it's like I was meant to be there. {but trust me when I tell you it took everything in me to pull myself off the couch, put clothes on, brush the teeth and get to church - this girl is OLD and cannot hang like those young'ns were at the after-party.} The message this weekend was made for me. The word - it was RIGHT. THERE. However, the word failure did not look like the image I had seen before - not scary, the alley was not dark, but fully lit. The music was joyful, not eerie.

"Failure is not final."

You see, failure is ok, failure is a thing. It happens. We all will fail at something. The blessing that comes from that is knowing that you TRIED. You had faith even as small as a teeny, tiny little mustard seed, you gave it a shot. Here's the deal: if we don't ever try, we will never do. If you don't ask the question, you'll never know the answer. If we sit back and allow life to happen to us, we'll never experience the joy that comes with realizing that life is happening FOR us. HE created us. HE knew what we could handle. HE continues to remind us that "Failure is not final." Remember that age-old "learn from our mistakes" phrase - oof. Mistakes, failure, it's all the same. We learn from it. We grow from it.

So, here we go - it's not going to be easy. It won't all be fun. But it's time for more Faith and less Fear. It's time to take a crack at new things - it's time to face the possibility of failure by being FIERCE. I'm walking into it, not away from it. Will you?