Introduction
Hello, my name is John Yates and I’d like to tell you something about myself and why I believe God wants me to be a part of the site.
This part of the journey for me began in a self-conscious way when I was twenty years old. I had grown up in a fairly ordinary Australian middle class home; my father was a professional race horse trainer and my mother a house wife. Mum and my (only) sister attended church quite regularly, more out of social convention than living experience. My father was an atheist, mainly it seemed through bad war time experiences, and I had no interest in the sort of religious instruction that was a routine part of state school curriculum.
Being a teenager in the sixties in urban South Australia shared most of the trials and temptations of the radical social transformation that was sweeping the western world at that time. Drugs never became a problem but I was into binge drinking for about five years. After doing my final year of high school twice (I was very lazy), I scraped into university intending to become a geologist and make lots of money to sustain a pleasure-seeking lifestyle.
How I Came to Follow Jesus
Towards the end of my first year of a science degree something begun to happen that I never anticipated, I lost all motivation to relate seriously with my friends and was no longer interested in girls, parties and drinking. Gradually I found myself slipping into a depression on meaninglessness. Around this time I started to develop some physical symptoms indicating something was wrong inside. There was a skin condition that kept breaking out over an extended period, this was diagnosed by a dermatologist as stress related. Then there were chest pains – the university GP referred me to a cardiologist who did an ECG that showed up normal. This was good news in the sense that my dad had a chronic heart condition, but not so encouraging for me when I was told the problem was psychosomatic. No further help was offered in either of these situations and I certainly felt both my parents would be bereft of understanding if I had tried to share with them in any meaningful way.
As I began to feel worse about life I decided to cut myself off from all sensitivity and enjoyments. I reckoned life without feeling had to be better than a life in pain. I deliberately withdrew from all social engagements with other human beings. I also stopped eating all sweet things and persuaded myself that behaviouristic models of human behaviour – we are no more than complex conditioned animals – were true.
By this stage my whole life was nothing more than driving from home to university and back. Irrational fears started to creep in until I was too frightened to walk down a public street or visit the local shops. The more I tried to live devoid of feeling the more my moods became dark, today I think I would be diagnosed as clinically depressed. There was no hope or joy in my life – just ever better results at study.
One day as I was sitting in the basement of the university library and feeling particularly bad a line of thought started to form in my head (I prided myself in being logical and scientific). It went something like this: “If there is meaning in life there must be life after death, for if there is no life after death then it doesn’t matter what happens in our lives now – whether we are rich or poor, healthy or sick, if it all comes to nothing in the end then when we die it’s all meaningless. If there is life after death this will require a miracle. (As a biology student I was convinced of this as a fact.) If there is a miracle this requires a God, no God no miracles. You need to read the Bible as the Bible is meant to be about God.” This is where the internal dialogue ended for the day and I thought nothing more of it.
The next day when I returned home I discovered a box full of books sitting on our kitchen table. These had been sent down from a neighbour and were ours to have or discard. Sorting through the books, most of which were cheap novels, I discovered a modern translation of the New Testament. Immediately I snuck it off to my room, not wanting anyone, especially my father, to know that I intended to read the Bible. Over the next nine months or so I read the scripture in secret, and having obtained a full Bible from the university library ended up going through the whole of the book twice. This was a powerful experience.
I was deeply persuaded of two things, first, that God had always loved me but that I had never loved him. I began to call this “sin”. Second, accompanying this was a terrible fear; inside I knew that if I happened to die in this state I would be outside of the experience of the love of God forever. I could only call this a most dreadful fear of hell and I would never want anyone to feel as I then felt. Almost all of this was happening as a private experience. Finally I was utterly desperate to do something about my estranged state – it was so horrible.
An opportunity seemed to arise at university, a Christian group advertised its meetings publicly and I was determined to make contact and ask for help. Setting off boldly one lunchtime I arrived at the door of the meeting room fully intentioned to enter, but I couldn’t. A wave of paralyzing fear swept over me and it was like an invisible force field filled he doorway. There was no way I could go forward and I found no release until I turned back. Over the next week the tension grew even stronger, there was a raging inner battle between a fear of being without God forever and the fear of initiating contact with this group of Christians. This time I managed to make it through the door and I presented myself to them fair and square as someone who wanted to become a follower of Jesus. What a relief to have come this far! Never again would I experience the depths of depression and hopelessness that had dogged me as a young man. Yet other traumas were to come.
Even though by now I had made a conscious decision to allow Jesus to rule my life I somehow struggled to accept that I could be accepted. The sincerity of my own decision simply didn’t seem real. I kept saying things like, “I know what the Bible says is true but do I really believe it?” This type of self –analysis held me back for some time, but I somehow grew out of it.
Next came episodes that some people called “demonisation” or “possession”. I would be in Christian meetings happily singing or listening and all of a sudden I would not be able to see, or I had “pins and needles” in my hands, or I began to shake uncontrollably. Today I would probably diagnose this as some sort of dynamic interplay between an attack by evil spiritual powers and a panic attack. What I do know is that once someone counselled me to stop focusing on what was happening inside me and cling to the promises of God from the Bible these attacks went away and never returned.
Over the years I have finished a science degree, married, taught high school, completed several awards in theology, worked as a minister in a range of churches, lectured in theology, and had five children.
The Counselling Journey
My involvement in pastoral counselling began in the following way. One day a therapist who was a member of the church where I was working made an appointment to see me, the first thing she said was, “God has told me to help you with issues to do with your father.” My father had been dead for nearly twenty years and I had no sense at all that there were any problems in my life that related to my relationship with my dad. People had found me rude and abrupt over the years, and I had encountered considerable conflict in my some of my church work, but I had never thought this had any relation to my childhood. (Today I would see this as a classic case of repression.) Nevertheless, because this lady had invoked the name of God I started to pray about the matter she had raised and to ask my heavenly Father whether any of this was true.
Through various circumstances God’s Spirit became to bring to the surface some powerful feelings that I could sense were related to my family of origin. Deep feelings of rejection, anger, hurt, trivialization, shame, guilt and more. Sometimes it was simply marvellous how Jesus arranged events to put me in touch with deeply buried decisions and sensations; like the time I had an extremely painful awareness of being not listened to whilst I was visiting Singapore.
The therapeutic relationship initiated by this woman went on regularly for about five years and was a very fruitful and releasing time. One thing that flowed out of it was that I started to be involved with men and women with a wide range of needs. I have tried to help many victims of abuse, the anxious, depressed, marital issues, those struggling with sexual identity, heaps of people with spiritual confusion and so on. One of the people that I have been involved with as a friend and minister for a number of years is Karen. Karen appears in Dennis Tannenbaum’s story and is the God –given link between us. We both love and appreciate Karen very much and have asked her to contribute to this site.
In pastoral direction I try to assist people in obtaining a sense of God’s perspective and presence in their life situation. My understanding is that the deepest possible resolution of every personal struggle relates to our image of God and how we need to work on this and so we freely allow him to come more deeply into our lives. I will detail how this happens in another article; it is enough to say here that my approach is centred on prayer and the person of Jesus.
I hope the brief details of my life that I have related will help you to understand why I believe that God is totally committed to the restoration and healing of those of us with inner struggles. Therefore I am firmly convinced that the InfraPsych website is a gift from God to the people of this world.
As the apostle Paul said, “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God.” (2 Corinthians 1:3- 4).
In coming to a close I definitely do not want to give the impression that the traffic is all one way. God has provided me with another counsellor who listens and advises me as a friend with the ongoing struggles of my life. These battles are very real, for instance I have not had what I would call a sound sleep for about ten years, and I have often been in conflict with authority figures in the churches. Nevertheless, I am truly able to say that I have learned that God is not responsible for the pain in my experience and that as I grow in my spiritual development my sense of who he is has become more and more wonderful.
Epilogue
My experience, and the reason that I have called this testimony “An Unfinished Story”, is that I believe that the journey of healing and restoration is never completed in this life. Only when I pass out of this world into eternity with Jesus will I share in the perfection of his humanity.
I am praying for everyone who reads these words, that each of you might more fully know some of the hope and meaning that God has so graciously placed in my life.