As our communities face the difficult task of creating and presenting town and school budgets, we will be asked to make some hard decisions.

As members of our communities, decisions that we make impacting individual members do indeed affect us all.

With the loss of revenue sharing and state funding, it will be all too easy to point fingers and try to place blame, fracturing us into angry groups. What we desperately need as a community is to work together toward the best possible outcome. Let us come together with understanding and compassion, always remembering that these budgets impact not nameless strangers but our friends, neighbors and children.

It is with thoughtfulness and hopefulness that we, as leaders of faith communities, will hold our communities in prayer during this stressful time. We will pray for compassion, kindness and respectfulness on the part of all who present budgets, all who debate them and finally for all who vote on them.

Pastor Izzie Radford-Nash, Pastor Carol Stevens, Pastor Cindy Christie, Rev. John Gensel, Father Timothy Walmer and Cindy Dawson, Pastor Justin Thacker, Pastor Ken Hinkley, Pastor Larry Hansen, and Pastor Dan Pearson invite all people of faith in our River Valley to join us in prayer for our communities, that whatever the outcome, we support and care for one another.

Pastor Cindy Christie, Rumford, for the other pastors