Rising to the Challenge

As the new year rolled in, I was met by a remarkably different feeling than I had received the previous New Year's Eve. At that particularly difficult 2008 dawn, I felt a remarkable feeling of coming peace, opportunity, and choice experiences. I latched on to that impressed promise and beheld the most blessed year of my life temporally, emotionally, and financially unfold.

This year I felt nothing. If anything, it was ominous. I returned to Provo, the family left, and school started. But I didn't want it to start. Choices, tough choices, needed resolution. My decisions would dictate my final areas of study, internships, and my first job out of school. Finance, Marketing, Operations, and Finance were all considered, classes sampled, and choices were made. To finish all of my academic undergraduate goals, I discovered, I am forced to take 18 credits for the next three semesters. Somewhere, somehow graduate school tests will be studied for and taken, a thesis researched and written, and a relationship developed and made eternal.

Challenges are painful but worthwhile. I've felt particularly daunted by the challenges of the day recently, but remember my favorite space ranger's anecdote, "Never give up, never surrender."