I was onstage and I started panicking onstage and it was like a fear that made me want to give up. (…) It was just such a defeating moment, but I got offstage and I was sitting in a room with Korey and I just unloaded.

I told her that I was just really struggling and I wasn’t sure why these feelings had come back and I was just panicking so much onstage that it made me want to give up and I just hate that feeling so much. And I said, “What is this feeling and what if this is something that I always have to fight?” And Korey just looked at me and said, ‘Then you never give up, Jen. You fight until the very last breath of your life. You don’t let it mess with your destiny.’ It was one of the most powerful conversations I’ve ever had and it was just so freeing. Yes, maybe I will have to fight and maybe these things won’t go away, but you’ve got to resolve in your heart that you will never let them defeat you and you will fight until your very last breath.

I would say “Not Dead Yet” is definitely the theme of my heart, because it was the moment I felt the lowest. It came out of a time when I actually was having panic attacks from anxiety – and I’ve never been through anything like that before – so it felt really disorienting and like ‘What is going on?’ It kind of shocked me, because I’ve never struggled with those things and it made me feel defeated. It made me feel disqualified from the Ledger project, actually. It was when I was praying and starting to step into those things that I started struggling a bit. I feel like things that God is on often do come under attack – you know what I mean – and often discouragement comes along with destiny type things. It was as I was struggling and wrestling with the Lord – ‘is this You, is this not You?’ – all of a sudden I’m struggling with fear in a way that is way more intense than anything else that I’ve been through. You wrestle through seasons like that and you think, “Yay, I’ve beat it. Finally, I’ve won!” Then it starts to creep up again a year later – and that was when I was like, “Man, I can’t believe after wrestling my way through a season like that – winning and having victory – I can’t believe it’s come back again.” It made me feel like, what if this is something I never stop fighting? And I said that to Korey Cooper after a Skillet show, because I was feeling those old feelings creep up, and she just looked at me and she said, “Then you fight, Jen. While there’s breath in your lungs and until the day that you die, you fight. And you never stop fighting, and you don’t let it rob you of working out in the calling of your life.” And that was what the song came from. It is just beautiful to surrender to the fact I’m never going to be perfect, and I can be sanctified through the Holy Spirit and God is working on me, but I still will fight. I might have the same battles that come up several times in my life, and even if they do, I’m not going to let it knock me down and keep me down. I’m just going to choose to fight it, even if it’s until the very last breath in my lungs. I just hope that song [has] that spirit of “It’s okay, God chooses us and it’s amazing that He chooses us, even though we’re not perfect. He wants to breathe His life through us and He wants to use us.” Let’s just celebrate in that, and let’s stop worrying all the ways we can’t and start focusing on all the ways He can.

– via Jesusfreakhideout.com