But I’m thinking of an old book by Japanese theologian Kosuke Koyama: “ Three Mile an Hour God.” Three miles an hour is approximately the speed of walking. Koyama says that this is God’s speed. In Scazzero’s Daily Office he quotes Pierre Teilhard de Chardin; “Above all, trust in the slow work of God. We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay. We should like to skip the intermediate stages. We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new. Only God could say what this new spirit gradually forming within you will be. Give our Lord the benefit of believing that his hand is leading you. And accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete.” Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (Michael Harter, S.J., ed., Hearts on Fire: Praying with Jesuits)

Hull concludes, however, that there is no single way of being human. To be human is a wide range of possibilities, all of which teach us something about how to love. It is only when we learn to value and appreciate the diversity of the human condition that we begin to understand the beauty of the diversity of being human — and the beauty of the diversity of participating in that community that is Jesus’s body.

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When I am not living in balance of being with God I become the fixer. A reconciler, Larry Webb recently said; “If I fix it, I get the glory. If God fixes it, He gets the glory.” When we move faster than God, our ego thinks that we are the one that is fixing and doing the work of reconciliation. If you place that way of thinking about God-as-slow and time-as-for-love, and place it beside the experience of people living with advanced dementia, we can begin to see how important it is to be Christlike in the ways in which we care.

Norm once walked all the time but never much thought about it. He never contemplated the simple joy, the giddy freedom, the everyday magic of walking: to bound up or down a flight of stairs, to glide across a kitchen floor, to stroll a beach, to hike a trail. To move from here to there on nothing more than his own two legs, under his own locomotion. Now, Norm thinks about walking all the time. He watches others do it — Uprights, he calls them — bounding, gliding, strolling, hiking, and the dozens of other things most of us do with our legs with barely a thought about it. It stuns and saddens him. He would give almost anything to walk again, and if ever by some miracle of heaven or earth his capacity is restored, it’s almost all he will ever do. I think of the late Asian theologian Kosuke Koyama, who wrote a book entitled ‘The Three Mile an Hour God.’ At a leisurely pace, humans can walk three miles each hour. And it’s while we are walking that relationships, and even faith, develop.” Godspeed.” That’s a traditional British way of blessing someone as they set out on a journey—similar to the French’s “bon voyage” or North America’s “safe travels.” Godspeedmarries two Middle English words, God and “spede.” It originally meant, “May God make you prosper.” The seed of this book was annoyance, or grief, or something in between. I was annoyed or grieved or whatever it is that lies between that many spiritual traditions have a corresponding physical discipline and Christianity has none. Hinduism has yoga. Taoism has tai chi. Shintoism has karate. Buddhism has kung fu. Confucianism has hapkido. Sikhism has gatka.

Jesus talks about gentleness. In the Beatitudes, he says “I am gentle.” Think about that: “I am gentle.” The God who creates the universe, the one who is all-powerful, who knows everything, is not only slow, but is also gentle. A fundamental aspect of being made in the image of that God is gentleness. Kosuke Koyama ( 小山 晃佑, Koyama Kōsuke, December 10, 1929 – March 25, 2009) was a Japanese Protestant Christian theologian. [1] Biography [ edit ] Three Mile An Hour God is a collection of biblical-theological reflections that loosely centers around the theme of the slow, Christian God. In short, God is slow, so slow to the point of a 'full stop' -- 'nailed down' -- at the cross! Koyama claims the fastest God goes is three miles an hour, or the average walking speed. Indeed, God walks with us, not ahead of us.

During our walk, a striking contrast emerged: it took members joining our team one hour to drive 45 miles—a distance that took walkers three days to complete. God Walk is published by HarperCollins Christian Publishing, Inc., the parent company of Bible Gateway. My whole life, I’ve tried to slow down. I’ve been in such a hurry, yet I can’t think of one upside to it. Maybe I finished earlier or arrived sooner once or twice, but even then, my haste made me anxious and my work shoddy. Besides all that, the overall result left me with higher blood pressure, poorer sleep and a hazy memory.Koyama, Kosuke (1976). No Handle on the Cross: An Asian Meditation on the Crucified Mind. London: SCM Press. But it’s its own little miracle. Dr. JoAnn E. Manson of the Harvard Medical School says: “If there was a pill that people could take that would nearly cut in half the risk of stroke, diabetes, heart disease, reduce the risk of cognitive decline, depression, reduce stress, improve emotional well-being—everyone would be clamoring to take it, it would be flying off the shelf. But that pill, that magic potion, really is available to everyone in the form of 30 minutes a day of brisk walking.” urn:lcp:threemilehourgod0000koya:epub:a0d4744c-53ab-4266-bbe1-f8d0d71bb044 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier threemilehourgod0000koya Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t1rg6033s Invoice 1652 Isbn 0883444739 Lccn 79024785 Ocr tesseract 5.0.0-alpha-20201231-7-gc75f Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 0.9470 Ocr_module_version 0.0.11 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA18488 Openlibrary_edition Love has its speed. It is a spiritual speed. It is a different kind of speed from the technological speed to which we are accustomed. It goes on in the depth of our life, whether we notice or not, at three miles an hour. It is the speed we walk and therefore the speed the love of God walks.’

Mark Buchanan: In the first half of the chapter, I confess my own struggles with prayer, especially prayer engaged from a sitting position: that for me is an invitation to either distraction or drowsiness. But my praying roars to life when I walk. Both praying and walking are about paying attention, within and without, and so praying and walking are good companions. We didn’t get here overnight. This country has been divided racially for hundreds of years. Those structures are still there and will still be there until Jesus comes again. But, as Paul says in 2 Corinthians 5: “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here! All this if from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation.” When you travel at three miles each hour, you can’t avoid the beauty—the God—in the details. You embrace the shade of clouds, you respect the oozing blisters on your feet, you feel the asphalt heat bathing your face, you smell the scent of the wildflowers, and you get the name of the woman mowing her lawn at eight in the morning. We witnessed the details, and in doing so, we were reintroduced to the imago Dei (image of God) in ourselves, the imago Dei in each other, the imago Dei in southern Indiana, the imago Dei in southern Illinois, the imago Dei in East St. Louis, the imago Dei in MRTI, and the imago Dei in a fossil-free PC(USA). This is odd. The very core of Christian faith is incarnation — God’s coming among us as one of us to walk with us. Incarnation is Christianity’s flesh and blood. And every part of Christian faith seeks embodiment, a way of being lived out here, now, in person. The church has fought tenaciously against anything that contradicts this. The earliest, most noxious, and most persistent heresy of authentic Christian faith is Gnosticism. Gnosticism says the body doesn’t matter — or worse, it’s evil. It’s a thing to be despised, maybe used, maybe indulged, but eventually discarded. It has no inherent value. There may be no reason for this. But I have a couple of suggestions. First, Jesus walked with God. He was living into and working out of His own relationship with the three-mile-an-hour God and took all the time He could get.There’s something else, obvious but rarely mentioned: When we walk, we carry ourselves. We notice when one person carries another person, especially if they’re both around the same size. An adult carrying a child is normal. But a child carrying another child, or an adult carrying another adult? Now we’re curious. We ask questions. Is the one being carried injured? Did he faint? Is she dying? Does the one who’s carrying have super-human strength?