Happy New Year from Ways of the World!

We hope your 12 Days of Christmas were fun, warm, caring and spiritual times. The Geranium Farm had such a "fun, warm, caring and spiritual" occasion Saturday night, "Twelfth Night", at the Farm, where almost all of us gathered for dinner and great conversation around the Crafton/Quaintance fireplace. Then yesterday, we celebrated by email the word from Matt the Web Dude that www.geraniumfarm.org was being honored with a World Wide Web Awards Humanitarian Award.

This last is a special thing. A group of web designers evaluate websites on criteria of design, content and ease of navigation. There are separate categories for Patriotic and Humanitarian sites, but to receive the award, even these must meet a minimum quality point requirement judged on the same basis as high-budget commercial sites. So it's a tribute to Matt and to the others for all the work each must do every single day to cultivate the Farm's Geraniums. However, if Barbara and Debbie and DJ and Buddy and Fr. Matthew feel as I do, this isn't really "work".

So let us proceed to the non-work at hand.

* * * * *

Coming back down to earth, it is January, and that means we're all sitting around with a boat-load of credit card bills and, this year, enormous heating expenses. How can we manage?

We're AOL users and some of their editorial content can be very helpful. Today, they feature material from SmartMoney.com on formulating a household budget we "can live with". Just reading through the topic headings is useful:

1. Make a list of regular expenses, such as mortgage payment, car payment and the like
2. Prepare for those high energy costs
3. Eliminate credit-card debt
4. Build an emergency fund
5. Estimate your total tax bill

I know, you're saying, "what did you mean, Carol, about 'non-work'? This is big work!" But it will save you work – and lots of money – later if you can take time to do these things now. [Ask me in two weeks if I've started on these myself!!]

See the AOL site, http://money.aol.com/top5/general/set-a-budget-you-can-live-with, for more color on exactly why these tasks are important and how to get going.

* * * * *

Meantime, it's the Epiphany Season, when Jesus as the Christ was made manifest to the world at large. On Ways of the World, we'll be commemorating this by writing more on the church and young people. You might recall from our "Advent Reading List" (December 2) that startling revelation from some Evangelical churches that young people seem not to be as church-going as before. We think our role as a social scientist is to talk about this and make sure you know about it, so we've been doing some reading on survey work among kids to see what they think. That and other information on factors in church growth are upcoming here during January.

Lent, as you're aware, follows quickly this year with Ash Wednesday on February 6; we plan some commentary then on stewardship. Yes, fund-raising, but really stewardship in the broader sense: how we take care of our resources and how we can translate that into ministry to business and business leaders. If that's an intriguing idea to you, stay tuned!

Best wishes to you all for a healthy and prosperous 2008! Don't forget to pray for the folks in Kenya and Pakistan . . . .