Sometime at the beginning of last December, I was walking to class and already dreading the upcoming semester.  I was already feeling stressed about the homework and the projects and the lists of stuff that I was going to have to do.  I get like that every semester.  I get school anticipation anxiety.  But as I was walking to class that one day, I had an epiphany: I can do it! 

I knew I could handle a new semester of hoops to jump through, because I had done it all before.  In fact, I had done this school thing a lot of times.  So I stopped worrying about it.  This experience reminded me of a little chat I had with my bishop when I was a freshman.  He stopped me in the hall and asked me how everything was going.  I told him it was good, but busy and stressful.  He told me that one of the reasons we experience hard things is so that we can learn our abilities.  We never know what we can do until we do it.

That 20 second conversation has stuck with me.  I have had so many growing and stretching experiences since then.  But I am glad, because now my reach is so much greater.   My confidence in my abilities grows every time I do something that I didn’t know I would be able to do.

I am sure that everybody else has doubts about their abilities and anxieties about the unknown too.  I just hope that when those feelings come we remember that we've done hard things before, and we can do them again.