Hope and Despair

mARCH - May 2025

Spring is undoubtedly a season of rebirth. Just when we despair that we might never see green again, the earth gently rallies from the silence of winter. Leaves begin to unfurl, blooms appear, and the sun shines brighter. Life springs out of cold and darkness into warmth and light, and all around us, creation shouts the praise of the one who touches our hearts and turns them from dead stone to living flesh. In some ways, it is easy to find celebration and hope in this season. 

But in springtime, we also discover a tension between hope and the human tendency to despair. Before we arrive at the crashing joy of Easter, we must first pass through the Lenten season and a keen awareness of our mortality. Before Christ rose from the tomb, He had to be stricken, smitten, and afflicted. Before gardens rise from the dirt, seeds must first die in burial. As God makes all things new, we must still journey homeward, often through pain and suffering. This tension will teach and shape us if we let it.

Despair can hold many guises, and this season we will peel back the layers and note how it hides in our lives as Christians and in the world around us. We will also explore what it looks like to hold hope–the gritty, robust kind — amid our grief and the broken story that despair mutters. In this season, we will focus on what hope truly is (and what it isn’t) and lean into ways that we can “practice resurrection” as Wendell Berry put it.