My name is Robert Yallup (Bob) to all my friends and at this moment in time I'm 55 yrs old, happily married to Kay and have two children (girls) who have both now flown the nest - the elder one, Jaime, is now living in Perth, Australia and the younger, Michelle, lives a couple of miles from us, here in Sutton in Ashfield, Nottinghamshire, UK.
At about the age of 6 I started attending St Mary Magdalene Church school in Sutton in Ashfield and also attending the Church itself. I soon became very interested in the fascinating story of Jesus and, loving singing, soon joined the Church choir. I can't remember anything spectacular happening to me between this time and the age of 9 when I moved, along with my family, to Mansfield Woodhouse, another small town in Nottinghamshire, but I now realize that a rather special seed had been implanted into my very being.
On moving to Mansfield Woodhouse, I joined the Church of St Edmund and once more joined the choir becoming a server there and later being confirmed. I served at St Edmund's until I left school at the age of 16, when I moved once more, along with my family to the small rural mining village of Bilsthorpe in Nottinghamshire.
I started working at the City Hospital in Nottingham as a laboratory technician in the Haematology department, travelling each day by motorcycle, the sixteen miles or so, to work and back. The travelling was difficult by motorcycle in the winter months and I was offered a room in the hospital's nurses home, which I eagerly took up.
Being just 16 years old and moving into a nurses' home - about a dozen males living in a home with some 300 or so female nurses - seemed like bliss at the time and, needless to say, despite attending the Hospital Christian Fellowship meetings and acting as server in the hospital chapel, my eyes very quickly turned away from Jesus towards more worldly pleasures and pursuits.
I met Kay, my wife, when I was about 19 yrs old, had a serious motorcycle accident shortly afterwards, which left me disabled, and was married at 21, starting a family shortly afterwards and moving back to Sutton in Ashfield, where my life had started. Quite a few different jobs followed including long periods of self employment due to my disability and the fact that Kay was blind (made working life a lot easier without having bosses wanting to know why you couldn't do certain things at certain times, due to pain etc.) However this eventually ended in our becoming bankrupt, losing our house, car and most of our possessions - it seemed like our life was over, homeless with two young children and not a penny to our names - little did I realize at the time just how wrong I was.
The local authority found us emergency housing and, after the initial periods of depression and feeling sorry for ourselves the reality of the situation finally started to sink in. We had all that mattered - each other and our children! Money didn't really seem to matter any more, well not like it had in the past. The years passed and the bankruptcy ended so, like fools, we started in business again, working for ourselves, as no-one else wanted to employ us. We found that the biggest problem we seemed to have in business was the fact that we wanted to help everyone that we could and if someone couldn't really afford the services that we were offering, but really did need them, we would inevitably drop the price so that they could afford it. Not good business sense I know! We kept managing to scrape a living for a number of years but inevitably, due to our poor business sense (in wanting to help everyone that we could), we went bust yet again. This time, we were already in local authority housing, so we didn't lose the house and the children were grown up, so they didn't have to suffer any of the consequences, but the deep depression that hit both Kay and myself was so much deeper this time around.
We just muddled along for a few years not having any direction or purpose in our lives. Then Kay decided to study with the Open University and six years later had a 1st class honors degree, the first in her family to achieve such a distinction, which made her feel good about herself. I had found myself driving past the driveway to St Mary's Church quite often and something/someone was calling to me from the driveway. I fought hard to ignore it but, sure enough, every time I drove past, the calling was there until I just had to go to the Church one Sunday morning to find out what was drawing me in.
Bearing in mind that the last time I had been in that Church I was just 9 years old, everyone seemed to be holding out a welcoming and loving hand to me, almost as though they had been waiting for me to return, all these years. As I am typing this, there are tears of joy flowing from my eyes, making typing quite difficult, at the thought of this moment. I was home at last, where I belonged.
I have now been back at St Mary's for 2 or 3 years (time has flown and I wasn't counting) and I have become a Pastoral Visitor to the sick and elderly with responsibility for the pastoral care of 2 local care homes, many of the residents having dementia, as does my own mother. My wife is now working as a volunteer for Framework HA, a charity working to help the homeless and vulnerable members of our society, and loving every minute of it.
I really do feel extremely blessed at this time in my life and it just feels right that I should let others know about the pure joy, love and peace that Jesus brings me in my every step as I go BOBBING ALONG WITH JESUS.
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