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.’

Walking is, along with eating and sleeping, our most practiced human activity. But unlike eating and sleeping, we don’t need to do it to survive. And so walking, though our most practiced human activity, is maybe our most taken-for-granted one, and sometimes our most neglected. You can, after all, go only seconds without breathing, mere days without eating. But walking — you can pass an entire lifetime and still do little of that. Until recently, I had lost, if ever I possessed, sheer astonishment at the simple, humble miracle of carrying myself every day everywhere. These legs are more wondrous than a magic carpet, more regal than a king’s palanquin. But only now have I come to see it. The Speed of Our Souls 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] 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. Christianity, when it is true to itself, proclaims the power, healing and transformation which is found in Jesus Christ. The moment that any Christian movement loses its focus on the person of Jesus Christ, it ceases to be fully, wholly Christian. It is the person of Jesus Christ which makes us the people of God.

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.

Dale T. Irvin & Akinade, A.E. (Co-editors). (1996). The Agitated Mind: The Theology of Kosuke Koyama. New York: Orbis Books. Finally, God matched our steps as we walked up to the podium in committee 8 at General Assembly in a posture of repentance to testify for the PC(USA)’s divestment from fossil fuels, and as we walked away from Friday’s plenary to die-in with our fellow activists. God Walk is published by HarperCollins Christian Publishing, Inc., the parent company of Bible Gateway. 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.Early in the journey, we spent time at First Presbyterian Church of Paoli, IN, located in the second-poorest county in the state. The church generously gathered four local activists to share what was happening in their town: how these locals were some of the first in the United States to organize against deforestation, and how they create collaborative farmers markets to rebuild the local agricultural economy. One activist noted that Indiana, his home, is sometimes called a ‘fly-over state’—a place where community building is happening, but which is too soon forgotten by coastal communities. In Pete Scazzero’s Emotionally Healthy Spirituality book, he names this struggle as number six of the top ten of being emotionally unhealthy; “Doing for God instead of being with God.” “The messages were clear: Doing lots of work for God is a sure sign of a growing spirituality. It is all up to you. And you’ll never finish while you’re alive on earth. God can’t move unless you pray. You are responsible to share Christ around you at all times or people will go to hell. Things will fall apart if you don’t persevere and hold things together. Are these things wrong? No. But work for God that is not nourished by a deep interior life with God will eventually be contaminated by other things such as ego, power, needing approval of and from others, and buying into the wrong ideas of success and the mistaken belief that we can’t fail. Our activity for God can only properly flow from a life with God. We cannot give what we do not possess.”

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. His last work was Theology and Violence: Towards A Theology of Nonviolent Love, published in Japanese in 2009 by Kyobunkwan, a publishing firm in Tokyo.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. 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.” 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.