Barely Living

We can live without living.  It is often our way to avoid pain.  To avoid the pain of poverty one had known when younger, they might work so hard as to lose a love that was once theirs.  Work draws all the attention.  Life goes too fast for love.  It is love that will slow you down.  An alcoholic is alive, but not really living.  They drink to avoid pain and they lose what love they had.  Love slows us down.  If you practice the spiritual life it must be for love and not to avoid pain.  The spiritual life will be for love if there is a growing relationship.  You know it is growing because you become less about yourself and more about others.  Foxhole prayers are just another way to avoid pain.  They are not relationship with a Power that is Love.