A very Happy New Year to you. Perhaps it is worth stopping for a moment to ask ourselves what we think would constitute a Happy New Year. That would be just as useful an exercise as making New Year's resolutions. Generally, though, we don't seem to be able to make time to reflect upon what is important to us, what we care about and what makes us happy.

Last year the Children's Society commissioned a major survey which asked over thirty thousand children what mattered to them. The report that came out of it, The Good Childhood Enquiry, was depressing in its analysis of childhood in our society but striking in its reporting of what children think is important. Quite simply, it's love: love of family and love of friends. In the afterword of the report, the Archbishop of Canterbury wrote: ‘This report is not ashamed to put love at the centre of the child's needs - and the adult's too: love not as a warm feeling alone, but as long-term commitment to someone else's well-being and as something that matters profoundly to one's own well-being.'

Put love at the centre, say children. Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings, as the old saying goes. Surely that's what we need to be doing if this coming year is to be a happy one for us and for all those whom we meet. Put love at the centre and happiness will creep up on us.

For me one of the great appeals of the Christian faith is that it tells me that, right at the heart and ground of everything, there is love; that love which I recognise as being the most important thing in life. It speaks to my experience. St John writes: ‘God is love and those who live in love live in God and God lives in them.'  That's the most important thing we need to take to heart if we're to truly have a Happy New Year. I hope you do.