Once More Into The Fray 

The line comes from The Grey, the 2011 film with Liam Neeson. His character is a man who has nearly given up on his own life—only to find himself fighting desperately for it after a plane crash in the Alaskan wilderness. What unfolds is both a literal and symbolic battle: man versus nature, man versus death, and ultimately, man versus himself.

One by one, the survivors are hunted by wolves who are fighting their own fight for survival. By the end, Neeson stands alone against the alpha. He must choose: surrender to the inevitable or stand up in courage, even when courage seems pointless. He chooses to fight. And in the moments before he charges forward, he remembers the poem his father used to recite—the lines he now repeats like a prayer.

The quote stayed with me long after the movie ended.

I didn’t grow up with ease. My parents immigrated to the U.S. just before I was born, and those early years were a stretch of survival all their own. I married young, had a child at nineteen, and spent years feeling like I was running behind the starting line everyone else seemed to begin at. My life wasn’t tragic, but it demanded grit before I even knew what the word meant.

Founding my company two years ago became another chapter in that long arc of struggle and becoming. I still remember the first night after I walked away from a stable paycheck and stepped into the unknown. The anxiety hit like a wave, but underneath it was an unmistakable sense that I wasn’t walking alone. Something bigger—someone bigger—was directing the path.

Since then, the journey has been a strange mix of terror, resilience, surrender, and faith. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve talked myself off a ledge emotionally. That friction has shaped me. It has softened parts of me that needed softening and strengthened parts that needed steel. It’s forced me into a place of acceptance—sometimes peaceful, sometimes unwilling—of what I cannot control.

People say “life is a journey,” and for a long time I heard that as a cliché. Now I understand it differently. Anyone who truly knows me knows I move fast. I make decisions with minimal information, execute, and iterate as I go. Movement has been my coping mechanism—my way of outrunning fear. If I’m sad, I move. If I’m anxious, I move. If I’m angry, I move. Moving has always felt like safety, like progress, like control.

But God, in His love, has a way of slowing us down when constant motion becomes avoidance. The past year has been that slowdown. A forced stillness. A season where problems couldn’t be outrun and emotions couldn’t be bulldozed. Every day has felt like a battle—one for my future, my faith, my children, and sometimes just my sense of self.

I’ve hated the battle. Truly hated it. And well-meaning friends reminding me to “enjoy the journey” felt like salt in the wound. Yet Scripture is unapologetically clear. Paul writes in Romans 5:3–4:

Strength doesn’t grow in comfort. Hope isn’t built in the easy years. The fight itself is the furnace.

I’ve learned to accept that truth. To stop resisting the journey and let it form me. But last night, after watching The Grey, I kept thinking about that line: “into the last good fight I’ll ever know.”

And I wondered—what happens when the fight ends? What if everything I’ve been climbing toward finally arrives? What if the company sells, the chapter closes, my children rise into the fullness of their own lives, and the striving stops?

I’m not sure.