Dear partners, friends and colleagues

As the days of 2006 draw to a close with this holiday season may this message bring you our best wishes of a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. Looking back at the weeks and months past, in spite of plenty a cause for concerns, worry and sadness, there are quite a few things to celebrate. Hopefully, time will heal old wounds and the New Year will bring new possibilities, and in the end it all will be alright.

First of all we give thanks to God for all of you members of country networks, of congregations and presbyteries participating in the Joining Hands Program. Your persistence and perseverance have brought us thus far and we can celebrate the blossoming of relationships of mutual transformation built across borders, oceans and continents. We want to present a special word of thanks to Christi Boyd for putting together this Web-based Newsletter. It is befitting and promising that the first issue would be a Christmas one. Thank you Christi and thanks to each and all who have contributed articles, news, stories, poems, analyses and pictures. This is YOUR Newsletter, and we count on you to use it and to make it a practical one, keeping us all linked together as an "intentional family" as our friends from India like to say.

Thank you to each and everyone for pursuing our common dream and struggle for justice and peaceful transformation. Some of you may have reached major milestones while others may have made only a few steps in their Joining Hands journey. All the same all can celebrate the changes and glimpses of hope that your efforts have brought forth.

As for us in Louisville, we, at last, produced the "roadmap" booklet on the Joining Hands journey. We also recruited and placed a companionship facilitator in Sri Lanka. We organized a new staff team for the Joining Hands program in Louisville, with Alexa, Alfonso, Eileen and Lionel. We are already excited that with new blood have come new ideas and energy for Joining Hands and for the Presbyterian Hunger Program in general.

However, this is a time of transitions. Last June, the Rev. Lynn Connette left us for a new call in Virginia. Then, the restructuring of the PC(USA) dissolved the Worldwide Ministries Division, where we've been housed, and created a new Relief and Development Work Area, our new home. Gary Cook -- the former director of the Global Service and Witness Division who has long ties to PHP -- has not been called to the new director's position. Sara Lisherness -- the director of the new Peace and Justice Work Area -- is our interim director for now. Mark Lancaster is no longer serving as PHP's coordinator. We wish them all Godspeed, and, to Sara, welcome.

Difficult as they may be, all these decisions may be harbingers of new possibilities. We are looking forward to what the future may bring in terms of new leadership to the Relief and Development Work Area as well as to the Hunger Program. Let's hope and pray that we will be able to continue as before in our common global hunger ministry, our humble accompaniment of the struggle for peaceful change with international partners around the world. Important markers lay around the corner.

You may recall that we had to postpone our second international event initially scheduled for 2007. Preparations have resumed and are underway to have it in the summer of 2008, again in conjunction with the Peacemaking program annual conference. An inclusive planning team will soon be put together to organize and make this another successful -"Tacoma like"- event. We are also looking at developing some intensive training retreats for the U.S. networks.

So may God bless you all.

Lionel

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