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# Fearless
- URL: https://essays.bluegreentheology.org/fearless/
- Published: 2026-03-15T13:22:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-07-06T19:54:33.000Z
- Author: Gideon L. K. Pollach
- Tags: ep-9

Earlier this week, a swan was working at the edge of the ice when we saw it pressing its long neck down through the gray surface, reaching for food beneath. Woodford and I stood at the water without speaking, the way you do when something has earned your full attention.

What struck me wasn't the swan's determination. That word implies a gritting-of-teeth, a pushing through difficulty. The swan wasn't doing that. It simply didn't seem to register the ice as an obstacle. It was eating breakfast. The conditions were what they were, and the swan's vocation was what it was, and the remaining ice was a minor logistical detail somewhere between the two.

The pond is open now. The snowbanks are nearly gone and they have left behind what snowbanks always leave behind: sand, grit, the accumulated trash of a long winter. Nobody is going to frame a photograph of that.

I'll be honest: we are in the long middle of Lent, and some of us are tired. The spare hymns, the muted liturgies, the relentless invitation to reflection — by the fourth week, it can feel less like a spiritual practice and more like a season that won’t end. I have at least one confirmed Lent hater in my household. They aren’t wrong. Its a tough season. 

But the swan had no patience for the idea that you wait for the beautiful version of things before you attend. The pond is sand and grit and the last gray ice. The peepers haven't started yet. None of that is the swan's problem. It has a vocation. It is living it. Fully. Now.

Fearlessness, it turns out, isn’t always courage in the face of danger. It is sometimes something quieter and more complete — the refusal to treat ordinary difficulty as a reason to hold back. The swan is not brave. It is simply entirely itself, in the middle of conditions that are not ideal, doing what it was made to do.

Faith at times like this is not asking us to enjoy the gray days. It is not asking us to pretend the season is more beautiful than it is. It is inviting something closer to what the swan already knows: that our vocation doesn't pause for better weather. That the life we are being called into is available right now, in the grit and the cold and the long-before-the-peepers moment.

Something beautiful happened this week, in this in-between time, watching a swan who had no idea we were watching.

**A Prayer:**

God of the long middle, who meets us not only at the beautiful edges but in the gray and gritty in-between: teach us the fearlessness of creatures who know their vocation so completely that conditions become secondary. When the season feels long and the beauty feels distant, keep us showing up — present, open, reaching through whatever is in the way. Through Christ, who did not wait for better conditions to love us, but came all the way down into the cold. Amen.