3 MPH

Living at the Speed of Love

In this post:

• Welcome to new subscribers, an introduction, and explaining the name “3 miles per hour”

• Learning why we all need someone to walk with (from Curt Thompson)

• Noticing small miracles that foreshadowed meeting Katie

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Japanese theologian Kosuke Koyama’s concept of the three-mile-per-hour God has been re-presented and re-positioned in myriad ways through the sermons and books of many others over the years. I can’t recall where I first heard it, but it went something like this: Jesus walked everywhere he went. He wasn’t in a hurry. He didn’t rush. He lived his life at 3 MPH.

This is a “welcome, let me explain and introduce myself” post, which seems appropriate and timely 1) because most of the people reading this are new subscribers, and 2) it’s New Year’s Day, and what better time to start with an introduction and reflect on life lived?

What struck me, and might stick out to you, about Jesus’ 3 MPH life was how very, very different it is from the way I’ve lived much of mine. It’s a sign of the times, sure. I live in the age of SUVs and superhighways and AI and microwaves. But I sense the timelessness of Jesus’ unhurried approach is less about modes of transportation and more about the inherent rhythm of faith.

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Something you’ll learn about me, if you stick around, is that I am a huge fan of the work of Dr. Curt Thompson, a psychologist and author with a fantastic podcast, which I quote from often. “I wish God were faster,” he said in the episode I listened to today. And he connected it to the fact that neural networks repair and grow at the rate of 2 millimeters per day.

I get that desire. The work of forming new pathways in the brain can be excruciatingly painstaking. When I need to be able to respond to a triggering situation in a healthful way like and all I get today is 2 millimeters closer to those synapses being able to connect and fire? That’s brutal.

But he said something else in a different episode that kind of makes it make sense. “Trauma happened in the context of relationship. So healing must also happen in the context of relationship.” The experience of someone sitting with you as you get better 2 millimeters at a time, and hearing them say, “I’m not leaving,” enables the healing until one day, you wake up and realize the message on repeat in your brain has become, “I’m not alone. I’m not alone. I’m not alone.”

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That’s my story, anyway. At least part of it, and it’s the part that feels relevant to this idea of living at 3 MPH, what Kosuke Koyama calls the speed of love. It’s the speed of walking, the speed of with-ness, and the only speed at which you can move forward and still hold hands. It’s the speed that says, “I may not be able to change my circumstances, but I can choose to keep moving forward, together with you.”

Who “you” is in this posture is both the most important part of it, and not important at all. Whoever “you” is for you is your most important person, and also it’s just really important that there’s someone. For a while, “you” was only God for me. But I always held on to the reality that even though God walked in the Garden of Eden with Adam every day, he still saw that Adam was alone, and that wasn’t good. Adam needed a “you” to walk with, hand in hand.

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The other day, I was reading entries in my journal, and I stumbled across something that stopped me in my tracks. I’ve never been a “word of the year” person, for the same reason I don’t do resolutions. It’s fine to set intentions and think, in January, about how you want to define your year, but come March, does anyone even remember?

But last year, according to my journal, around the first of the year, God impressed a single word on my heart: pure. I committed it back to him and prayed that he would do his work and mark 2025 as a year of purity, and I really have no idea what that meant to me at the time. I left it there and walked on.

I had been doing a lot of walking the previous year, actually. I lived in an old neighborhood in Spokane. It was on a hill with old houses and big trees. Many of the houses were big, too. Mine was not—it was just old. And it was kind of dark and cold, and it was a lifeline for me to get outside and walk. For reasons unknown to me at the time, I had felt impressed to commit my walks on Wednesdays to praying for my future wife, and I did.

If you wore green on Wednesdays in 2024, you may have a better understanding than me about why that feels significant. If not, and you feel like you suddenly lost the plot, that’s OK. What’s important to know is that in 2025, I unexpectedly found my “you” after finally learning to live (somewhat) in the cadence of faith, at 3 MPH. For me, it looked like walking on Wednesdays to pray for a woman I didn’t know. It looked like pausing to imagine the new year with God, only to hear him whisper her name—Katherine means “pure.”

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These are small miracles. But noticing is the power of the 3 MPH speed of love. I enjoy hiking, and if you ever hike with me you’ll catch me noticing all of the small miracles hiking uncovers.

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So that’s what’s behind the name of this writing outlet I’ve started. Whatever lies ahead for your year, I hope you encounter it at 3 MPH. I hope you have someone’s hand to hold along the way, even if it’s just you and God. I hope you notice the miracles along the way.

What does living at the speed of love look like for you?