Pace

--"Time flows away without my pushing it. A coffee cup will not go away unless I push it. An oxcart will stay unless the ox pulls it. A jumbo jet will not fly until the powerful engines propel it. But time slips away without the aid of anyone or anything. How strange! Time makes me feel as though I were not important. How important I feel when I push something or someone....The more one pushes the more one feels important...

But time humiliates me. It limits me. I cannot push it. Time pushes me. I say innocently that 'time flows.' Actually it may be I that am flowing. If then, I flow, I hope to flow with time and in time. It would be intolerably lonely to be outside of time. Timelessness would be homelessness. I don't want to be orphaned by time. When I think about time I have no other choice than to be humbled..."

--"In the wilderness our speed is slowed down until gradually we come to the speed [at] which we walk--three miles an hour....

I find that God goes 'slowly' in his educational process of man. 'Forty years in the wilderness' points to his basic educational philosophy. Forty years of national migration through the wilderness, three generations of the united monarchy..., nineteen kings of Israel and twenty kings of Judah..., the hosts of the prophets and priests, the experience of exile and restoration--isn't this rather a slow and costly way for God to let his people know the covenant relationship between God and man?

Jesus Christ came. He walked toward the 'full stop.' He lost his mobility. He was nailed down! He is not even at three miles an hour as we walk. He is not moving. 'Full stop'! What can be slower than 'full stop'--'nailed down'? At this point of 'full stop,' the apostolic church proclaims that the love of God to man is ultimately and fully revealed. God walks 'slowly' because he is love. If he is not love he would have gone much faster. Love has its speed. It is an inner speed. It is a spiritual speed. It is a different kind of speed from the technological speed to which we are accustomed. It is 'slow' yet it is lord over all other speeds since it is the speed of love. It goes on in the depth of our life, whether we notice or not, whether we are currently hit by storm or not, at three miles an hour. It is the speed we walk and therefore it is the speed the love of God walks."

Kosuke Koyama, Three Mile an Hour God

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