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Three Mile an Hour God

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The next thing he told me is how he was worried about his final exams in college. I told him how I once had to take my exams for my GED and asked God to help me take the test and that help came in the sense of calmness.The next thing I said to this young man was, You go to church, Have you asked God for any help in your life? He looked at me as if he new what to do next. By this time he was pulling off the side of the road right in front of the First Baptist Church which sits on the side of the highway.As I got out of his car he thanked me for my help.there was now a calm about him as well. Mark Buchanan: The Bible, end to end, uses the image of walking in both a literal and figurative sense to explore the forming and outworking of faith. God walked, presumably with Adam and Eve, in the garden of Eden in the cool of the day. Enoch walked with God. Noah walked with God. The prophet Micah says that the three things God requires of us is to love mercy, do justly, and walk humbly with God. In the New Testament, particularly in the writings of John and Paul, walking is a key image to describe living out our faith. And then, above all, the gospel writers (especially Mark) depict Jesus as a constant walker, always inviting others to “ Come, follow me.” Koyama was born in Tokyo in 1929, of Christian parents. He later moved to New Jersey in the United States, where he completed his B.D. at Drew Theological Seminary and his Ph.D. at Princeton Theological Seminary, the latter on the interpretation of the Psalms of Martin Luther in 1959.[2] In works such as Water Buffalo Theology and Three Mile an Hour God, he defended a theology that he considered to be accessible to the peasantry in developing nations, rather than an overly academic systematic theology. In total, Koyama wrote thirteen books. One of his most well-known books, "Water Buffalo Theology", was described as "ecological theology, liberation theology and contribution to Christian-Buddhist dialogue". [3]

A few days after our time in Paoli (though still in Indiana), we read a short piece written by Josh Heikkila, PC(USA) Regional Liaison for West Africa, who wrote about living in West Africa’s Sahel region, where the land is dry, the trees are few, and the water is far. People walk everywhere, and children are tasked with fetching water. Heikkila shares, We walked over 200 miles in 15 days from the headquarters of the Presbyterian Church (USA) in Louisville, KY to the gathering of the 223rd General Assembly in St. Louis, MO, to ask the PC(USA) to divest from fossil fuels, learn more about climate change, and minimize our own carbon footprint. Each day went something like this: eat, worship, sunscreen, walk, sunscreen, talk, repeat, … and then we would collapse on our host church’s floor. Upon arrival at the end of each day, across Indiana and Illinois, we were welcomed to eat, fellowship, and worship with our host congregation. At a pace of about three miles each hour, we were walking every day from 7:30 in the morning to about 2:30 in the afternoon. He once could, with poise, with strength. He wasn’t Buster Keaton, but he strode the earth with vigor and ease and effortless balance. But in as much time as it takes you to read this sentence, he stopped walking. Not by choice. He lost the use of both legs, and most of the use of both arms, when his horse, his trusted horse, threw him sideways and gravity pulled him earthward and he hit the ground at an angle that broke things inside him. In a blink, he went from agility to paralysis, from mobility to confinement, from standing most days to sitting all of them. One moment, his legs went wherever he told them. The next, they refused. The Revd Dr John Swinton is a former nurse, a minister in the Church of Scotland, and Professor of Practical Theology and Pastoral Care at the University of Aberdeen. His books include Dementia: Living in the memories of God, which won the 2016 Michael Ramsey Prize, and Becoming Friends of Time ( Reading Groups, 8 September 2017), both published by SCM Press.

Do you take regular walks? How might you incorporate more walking as a spiritual practice into your day-to-day life? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments!

Certainly, my own attempts to love mercy and do justly have faltered every time I’ve tried to muster them on my own. I just don’t have it in me. I can’t dredge up enough mercy or love to get me going or enough justice to prime the pump. These things only ever come when I’m close to God: the One who loves mercy and does justly, and the One who shares His inner life with me. Here’s the problem; even though I get the main idea of God moving really slow in the work of reconciliation. The false self wants reconciliation to happen now, in my time, with my agenda and so that I can control it. I get really frustrated at the God who moves three miles an hour. Which brings me to the book under review. Mark Buchanan is a Canadian pastor and the author of many books. His latest, God Walk: Moving at the Speed of Your Soul, is unapologetically inspirational in its intent. He hopes to motivate readers who walk only when it’s obligatory (they are legion) to walk more, yes, but his goals extend well beyond that. He wants all of us to think about walking and practice walking with a new mindfulness, informed by God’s self-revelation in Scripture. To this end, Buchanan draws on a rich variety of biblical texts; the motif of walking, he argues, runs through the Bible in a way that most of us have never noticed.

Bibles by Type

There is no indication here that God does this in judgement. God simply says that he does it. I don’t know what that means, but, at a minimum, it indicates that the God who creates the universe and loves it into existence, the God who is love, is deeply implicated in human difference, not in terms of judgement, but as a loving, creating presence.

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. It’s possible that Micah is listing three separate things. But it’s more likely that he’s only listing two (to love mercy and to do justly) and that we only get these two things by walking humbly with God. Walking is the means to our transformation. Walking is the practice that makes us Christ-like. The first was frustration. My faith seemed disembodied, not worked out in flesh and bone and breath, a thing mostly in my head, rendered as doctrinal tenets rather than a living and life-giving experience. And I noticed that many other Christians were struggling similarly with the gap between professed faith and lived faith. Virtually every major faith has a corresponding physical discipline—think of Hinduism and yoga. He cites Luke 24:32, a scripture passage from the Emmaus Road where travelers remember how Jesus walked and talked with them. Jesus is a walking God; God is a ‘three mile an hour God.’

The Art Of Walking

I think Jesus chose the long walk because generally, that is what disciples need. After all, Jesus wants to make us no less than what He Himself is, one who loves mercy and does justly. But the only way from here to there is the long way. And the only real means of travel is to walk it humbly with God. At about three miles an hour. 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.’ The prophet Micah asks the question, “What does God require of us?” He considers a bunch of religious options—extravagant sacrifice, heroic piety—but finds they all fall short. His answer? To love mercy, to do justly and to walk humbly with God. But I’m starting to get it. I drive the scenic route to work now. I stop and engage in lengthy discussions with more people more often. I eat slowly and linger over meals. At least sort of.

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