After a day of near-summer heat, my home town returns to rain. And it falls gently around my house, on the grass and the trees and in the garden beds, and coming to the end of a tiring day I am soothed by the sounds it makes. Rain reminds me that God is good: HeContinue reading “Ordinary Wednesday: November Rain”
Author Archives: Matthew Pullar
Ordinary Wednesday: Small Steps
I have always been one to leap ahead. When I was thirteen and a half I declared to my family that I was “nearly fifteen”. I spent most of my childhood planning what I would do “when I grew up”, and now that I am a grown up I wonder when I will feel thatContinue reading “Ordinary Wednesday: Small Steps”
Ordinary Wednesday: Will you even know yourself?
So yesterday I handed in the final assignments for my Graduate Diploma in Divinity, bringing to a close 12 years on and off of study at a theological college. I wish I could share with you here the photo of myself on my student card when I began. Disshevelled, full head of flowing hair andContinue reading “Ordinary Wednesday: Will you even know yourself?”
Ordinary Time: What the fish knows
We take this break from our regular Ordinary Time programming for me to introduce you to the newest member of my family: Shemmy Kenja-Penja Pullar. Shemmy is a betta fish – also known as a Siamese fighting fish – purchased for the fourth birthday of my highly inquisitive, nature-and-ocean-loving eldest son. If you read myContinue reading “Ordinary Time: What the fish knows”
The Fish Tank
Unaccustomed to fish and their ways,we realise quickly that the goldfish bowls of our childhood are no longer the way,and so, acceding to a preschooler’s wish,my wife spends hours learningthe ways of fish tanks and the fish that dwell in them,then imparts this learning to me as wegather together accoutrementsand seek to keep a fishContinue reading “The Fish Tank”
Ordinary Wednesday: Present Perfect
This morning when I woke to my children climbing on each other and me and complaining of each other’s intrusion into their personal space, I found myself very quickly feeling resentful and grumpy. It was my first day back at school – in person, not on a computer – for eight weeks and I wasContinue reading “Ordinary Wednesday: Present Perfect”
After Losing
And what if, in the end, you lost it all?In the poorly timed decision,the negligent hurry,in missing the moment for the undoing click?What if, in a swift dazzle of technology, allyour acts and monuments fell down a drainnever to be found or known again? Would you, then, wake up at sunriseto find that, in spiteContinue reading “After Losing”
Refinery Shadow
Family reunion brings us here,where gum trees open onto two eternal flamessmoking up suburban Sunday sky.Our park – the edge of our travel limits, sitsbeside quiet street and underthe refinery’s steady shadow.Two swings, two slides, ancient eucalypts,and where houses fence the park’s perimeter, a hidden gateopens while we picnic and outpops a man’s head, thenContinue reading “Refinery Shadow”
Ordinary Wednesday: Ordinary Obedience
There’s a book I love which has a title almost as good as the book itself: A Long Obedience in the Same Direction by Eugene Peterson. I’ve been thinking a lot about this phrase recently, because I’ve been struck by how much of life is simply about perseverance, and Christian life in particular. Whether facingContinue reading “Ordinary Wednesday: Ordinary Obedience”
Ordinary Wednesday: Not in the fire, not in the quake
One of my favourite moments in the Bible is the little, anticlimactic story after one of the big show-stopping stories. It comes in 1 Kings 19, immediately after Elijah has triumphed over all the false prophets of Baal and the land-grabbing wicked King Ahab. God has shown up in an undeniable way to give ElijahContinue reading “Ordinary Wednesday: Not in the fire, not in the quake”
The Consolations of Writing 