A Message from Pastor Andrea Chaumont

March 19, 2026

Dear MBPPC,

Thornton Wilder said…

“Hope is a projection of the imagination; so is despair. Despair all too readily embraces the ills it foresees; hope is an energy and arouses the mind to explore every possibility to combat them…In response to hope the imagination is aroused to picture every possible issue, to try every door, to fit together even the most heterogeneous pieces in the puzzle. After the solution has been found it is difficult to recall the steps taken - so many of them are just below the level of consciousness.” 

In Psalm 130, the psalmist repeats the words “wait” and “hope.” Waiting in the Biblical sense is not passive, but active. We wait in a posture of hope that moves us to faithful action. I can remember a conversation I had many years ago with a family member who said that for them, Christianity was a crutch. They were echoing the sentiment of former Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura who said, "Organized religion is a sham and a crutch for weak-minded people who need strength in numbers”. Psalm 130 could not disagree more. In American culture we tend to minimize suffering, deny it or “treat it as a puzzle that must be explained” (Eugene Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction). Peterson says, “the remarkable thing about Israel is that it did not banish or deny the darkness from its religious enterprise.” Rather than Christianity being a crutch for the weak, the Bible gives us language for expanding our ability to face suffering (both ours and our neighbors). “A Christian is a person who decides to face and live through suffering” Peterson writes. We don’t grin and bear it, but rather we pray it ("When you pray, move your feet” as John Lewis often quoted) along with Israel “my soul waits for the Lord…hope in the Lord!” 

Are you curious about what hope looks like lived out in real life? Listen to this interview about hope in despair from Father Greg Boyle on Kelly Corrigan Wonders https://www.kellycorrigan.com/podcast/fr-greg-boyle

Lenten Blessings,

Andrea