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?

To be with people living with dementia, you need to slow down and take time for those things that the world considers to be trivial. When you do this, you will be surprised — and probably amazed — at what you discover, as you encounter people in the slowness of God’s love. There is a deep beauty in such illumination.

Studies by Audience

At the end of each chapter, under the heading “God Speed,” Buchanan includes a brief reflection set apart typographically from the main text. These oblige the reader to make intuitive connections; they function a bit like the sudden juxtapositions in haiku. My favorite among them is the one at the end of Chapter 15, “Walking as Flight,” which offers a fresh angle on Søren Kierkegaard. We walk because three miles an hour, as the writer Rebecca Solnit says, is about the speed of thought,2 and maybe the speed of our souls. We walk because if we go much faster for much longer, we’ll start to lose ourselves: our bodies will atrophy, our thinking will jumble, our very souls will wither. 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.’

Water Buffalo Theology is probably Koyama's best-known work. The book was partly inspired by Koyama's work as a missionary in Northern Thailand. [4] His works of Mount Sinai and Mount Fuji and Water Buffalo Theology are, in part, an examination of Christian theology within the context of Thai Buddhist society, growing out of Koyama's missionary experience in Thailand. Koyama was an editor of the South East Asia Journal of Theology, for which he himself wrote a considerable number of articles. Koyama published at least thirteen books, including "On Christian Life" (currently available only in Japanese) and over one hundred scholarly articles. Koyama's work has been described as helping to bridge the boundaries between East and West, between Christianity and Buddhist thought, between the rich and the poor. It has been pointed out that he has no overarching system in this theology, which shows commitment to serving a "broken Christ trying to heal a broken world" [ citation needed]. He was named as an important figure for the development of a world Christianity. [2] 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. Recently I was sitting with a brother in the fight for reconciliation, Donell Woodson and he said something that has been ringing in my head since we met; “Take the long arc of reconciliation.” His encouragement to me was to see the work of reconciliation as a marathon, not a spring because the history of racial injustice in our country. Think, for example, about the calling and vocation of Moses. He has a significant speech impediment. God says, “Listen, I’ve got a big job for you.” What does Moses respond? “I can’t do it because I’ve got this speech impediment. Could you not send somebody else?” God basically says to him “Do what you’re told!” 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.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.”