By Kathleen Miller, Keighley shared Churches - On a frosty December morning I got up in the dark - a barking dog had disturbed me - and opened thick heavy curtains. What a sight met my eyes!

A deep blue velvety sky studded with myriad stars, some lone, some groups of tiny ones, some still, some twinkling, some forming shapes and patterns.

In the background dawn was just streaking the sky. In the foreground stood a gaunt bare tree, its trunk black and solid with boughs and branches reaching out and up to the heavens. The lower trunk was out of sight, with roots anchored in cold dark soil.

Jesus said: "I am the vine, you are the branches." A vine, like that tree. Jesus, rooted so strongly in love, immovable, constant, eternal, mysterious, wonderful, extending from lowly earthly soil to the limitless heavenly Kingdom of God.

He is our pathway to goodness, to fulfilment, to real living, to God. We can stay earthbound - live our little circumscribed lives bound by all the superficial concerns and material possessions.

We can love ourselves best, expect the world to revolve around us and let our time be taken up with appearance, diet, entertainment, pleasure, self indulgence, money and the like.

When all those centuries ago Jesus came to earth, it was to save us from that. From being earthbound, from always looking down or at best sideways - such a limited vision. He showed us to look up to heaven, into the eyes of people around us, out to distant horizons. He showed us God's love in person, in everything He did or said or thought. He taught us how love could penetrate our hearts, changing the way we think and behave, the way we see other people, removing the focus, the pivot, the core of our activity, and interact, from our own little selves, and putting God in its place.

That's how to be a branch of the vine of Jesus - living, vital, the life force coursing through us from Him, extending far and wide to all we meet, connecting them and us to God.

Purpose, stability, knowing we have a place, that we belong, that we are loved and can give love. Aren't these the needs people are searching for? Forget big shiny cars, desirable homes, exotic holidays, designer clothes. Who needs them when real living is there for the asking?

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.