Slow God

Kosuke Koyama once wrote a book called Three Mile An Hour God - three miles an hour being the pace of walking. Koyama’s point being that God is not in a hurry. When the world speeds up, God goes slow.

It’s like love. You can’t love fast. When a couple tells me they have known each other for six weeks and want to get married I tell them, very politely of course, to get lost. I tell them to get lost in each other in order to find the truth of each other and of themselves. Sometimes this can take only six months, but usually it takes a number of years.

Despite what magazines or soap operas tell you, you can’t pull into a drive-through and order a double, crispy love burger with a side of meaning and a large commitment. For the simple reason it won’t be love. Love takes time - both the time on the clock and the pace of the heart. Love is more akin to my nana’s Christmas cake with multiple ingredients soaked for days and slow baked for hours.

There are two words in Greek for time: chronos and kairos. The first is chronological time, the time on the screen, minute upon minute. The second is the right time, the time of the heart, grace upon grace.

Summer is a time for slowing down. When chronos catches up with kairos. Long may January be a time when shops keep shorter hours, when the economy slows, when newspapers are thinner, and New Zealand goes on a picnic. If we like it this way we need to work to keep it this way, chiefly by lowering our expectations of others and ourselves.

There is a time for everything – a time to slow down, to turn around, and see the agapanthus and the fairies dancing on top.