What is love?

How can one know when they are beating a dead horse?  Probably once you notice that stiff attitude of self hate and exhausting expression of pain on your own face. Those are the tell tale signs of heart break and honesty.  I'm notorious for just running away when life gets rough, a unwanted trait inherited through a life experience that wasn't always the most confronting. Maybe that's why I'm so in love with The Civil Wars and their sad melodies along with the adorable southern tinge.  It seems better to drown oneself in piano, guitar and sullen voices than to actually face the reality of life.  None the less, as soon as that iPod is turned off and I step out of my little 1991 bimmer into the sunlight of the speeding life of materialism, relationships, and blinding realism, I understand that I can't just walk this path alone. Yes, my happiness matters, but not as much as my faith.  If my faith is suffering, it is my eternal soul which suffers most, not my self.  The self is so insignificant.  I want my soul to rejoice and be happy and if that means I gotta stay in my home, then I gotta stay.  But that said, I really don't need to break hearts along the way.

Sometimes one falls into love fast and hard only to understand later that it wasn't the best way of doing things.  Love does hurt and it's not easy.  It takes lots of time and energy and isn't contained in some box hidden instead your body.  It's a spiritual quality that is limitless.  It is something that is not attached to anyone or anything.  It's nothing that can be describe except as a quality of God. Man can attempt to understand it, but will always fall short.  It takes an everlasting striving endeavor to attain the true quality of love.  And if I can just continue on that path with a striving attitude and a posture of learning, I hope that those hardships I encounter better the lives of those involved rather than damage them.  That's my only prayer tonight.