Is it just me or does it seem that there aren’t enough hours in a day?

The day starts with me reluctantly leaving slumberland to quickly shower and get dressed and head on off to work. Then comes the paradox of time when you’re at work — on one hand the hours feel so interminably long that you can’t wait until your 8 hours are up, but on the other hand you don’t seem to have enough time to finish the tremendous amount of work that needs to be done. So somehow while at work, time moves too slowly and too quickly at the same time.

And then when the work day is done, you just want to kick back and relax. But a little voice nags at you, “When are you going to find time to exercise and keep fit?” You ignore the voice and think to yourself, should I watch TV? Should I go online? Should I read? There are so many things you want to do with your time, but you can’t seem to cram it all in one day.

And soon, it’s bedtime, and while you enjoy the thought of a full 8 hours of sleep (or more!), you have this feeling that there’s so much more you want to do before retiring for the day. And then you finally *do* go to sleep, and the next morning the cycle repeats itself all over again. Maybe I should move to the South Pole where the days and nights stretch on to forever.

There are some love stories that you hear that make you sigh and gush about the sweetness of romance. Stories about dashing knights and fair maidens and living happily ever after. The story I heard on the drive home today does not fall into that category.

Instead, that story struck a chord deep within me, about how love is truly a decision, a commitment stronger than mere emotion. Yes, we’ve all heard that “love is a decision” spiel before. But when you see a love endure years of numerous fights and drunken bouts, see it overcome an entire spectrum of emotions from hurt to anger to fear and pain, when you see love transcend all that, then you *know* at a deeper level the truth of the phrase “love is a decision”. When you see it lived out before your very eyes, the _intellectual knowing_ is transformed into a _soul knowing_. And then you open the eyes of your heart and see another thing: love transforms. True, unconditional love can change us, can shape us piece by piece until we are a better person.

Love is more than a fleeting emotion, it is a conscious choice. And when the choice is made to love, it becomes a force for trandormation. At every moment, as a person again chooses to love, that force grows in strength. Until the person being loved can resist that force no longer, and both are transformed by that love.

That is the love story I heard today.