Happy New Year!  Our traditional calendar has now caught up with our liturgical calendar in that we have a new year and, one could say, another clean slate.

 

It is time again to start cyclical things again. We start a new winter, a new spring. Soon, we will start another season for Lent, Easter and later will start a new summer then a school year, Advent and so on. 

 

At The Observer, we begin another subscription drive. And with it, comes a new  theme.

 

“Build Your Faith. Use Good Tools.” is a very motivating theme in so many ways. Building, blueprints, tools, framing and architecture are all words used not only in the building trades but also in the Gospels. Scripture and Christ Himself talked many times about solid foundations, building on solid ground, cornerstones and building the Church.  That’s why it is very motivating to have a good theme to focus on when asking you, our readers, to purchase another year of The Observer — a newspaper we whole-heartedly believe is a good tool for your faith.

 

Amanda, Gary, Jill, Margarita, Megan and I work very hard each week of the year to craft a solid tool that will help inspire you to build a faith, which Bishop Malloy says in his column this week (page 2) will help bring forth good fruit.

 

We put together a poster this year that shows some of the other tools Catholics use to assemble a life of faith that will help us live well here on earth and also pave a good road for our souls to reach the next life in heaven and allow us to live forever with the God who created us.  The poster features a blueprint background with artwork depicting the Eucharist, prayer, the rosary, laying on of hands, adoration, the Church and the Scriptures. 

 

At The Observer, we use and are constantly driven by these gifts of our Church and strive to incorporate all those things into our pages so that you will know your faith, be empowered to share it with others and avail yourself of the activities of spiritual growth and prayer offered by Catholic churches and organizations all around this great diocese of ours.

 

Now I know there are many things that compete for a person’s time. We have our phones to entertain and connect us with everything. But if we are making connections to only secular things we can never expect our faith to strengthen and to stand firmly. If we don’t put things of faith in our routines, we can never expect anything but sandy soil like the parable tells us. 

 

As always, The Observer can be enjoyed on your phone, computer or tablet, or you can sit with the traditional  paper copy and spend some time with the columns, news and information like you would a good friend visiting your home. 

 

And even though we found it necessary to increase our price a bit this year to help absorb the last 20 years of paper, postage, labor and ink increases, The Observer is still a very affordable tool to have in your home. We encourage you to share this tool with your neighbors and friends too. 

 

As the calendar flips over to another new year and another February in which we celebrate Catholic Press Month, I hope you remember that it is again time to invite a good tool into your home with a new or renewed subscription to The Observer. I pray too, that the theme for our subscription drive helps you focus on using good tools to build a faith that lasts well beyond this earthly life. I pray you keep The Observer in your collection of tools. 

 

Subscribe today online or use the renewal envelope you will receive in the mail or an envelope available at your parish. Thank you. 

 

To subscribe online, visit https://observer.rockforddiocese.org