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”
Category Archives: Ordinary Time
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”
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”
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”
Ordinary Wednesday: Daily Bread
During the first Melbourne lockdown around Easter 2020 I began baking bread. One of the first items to start disappearing from supermarket shelves was bread (after toilet paper…) and with shops overwhelmed by panic-buyers rushing in to get everything they needed for the apocalypse it was generally easier to make do with what we hadContinue reading “Ordinary Wednesday: Daily Bread”
Ordinary Wednesday: In Between Poems
Heaven’s chimes are slow, but sure to strike at last; Earth’s sands are slow, but surely dropping thro’: And much we have to suffer, much to do, Before the time be past. Christina Rossetti, “Heaven’s chimes are slow” One of my favourite stories is a little-known work by J.R.R. Tolkien called “Leaf By Niggle”. ItContinue reading “Ordinary Wednesday: In Between Poems”
For all your unwritten poems
This one has a stone wall that you saw driving north at sunrise on your last day at work. You thought, “I’ll write a poem about that”, but by sunset it was lockdown again and you went home to stay home. No poem. This one has a glimpse you caught of your face reflected inContinue reading “For all your unwritten poems”
The Consolations of Writing 