Nine Minutes Past Midnight by Crocker Ernest F.;

Author:Crocker, Ernest F.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO017000, book
ISBN: 4573015
Publisher: Authentic Media
Published: 2013-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

16

Letting Go— Letting God

God showed me that He is the Great Physician and I’m just the assistant. He’s the boss and I’m just...Oh wow!

Brad, Family doctor

“I came to know the Lord when I was seven years of age,” said Brad, “and spent the next twenty-seven years trying to figure out what I was supposed to do with my life.”

I was speaking with Brad, a pleasant-faced, softly spoken family doctor from San Diego. His dress, demeanor and facial expression signaled that he was a deeply sensitive and caring person.

As a young man he had struggled with his Christian commitment. “Mom and Dad were Christians and they really tried to live out their Christianity in the home. But I continued to ask myself, Am I really committed to what I believe? Am I sanctified? Y’know, I remember a time when I was walking near this rose garden. I said, ‘It doesn’t matter, God, what I do, I just need to be sold out to You. Don’t care whether I’m a plumber or a doctor, I’d just give up anything for you.’”

Through college Brad developed a passion to become a medical doctor and serve on the mission field. But after fourteen letters of rejection from medical schools, he began to doubt his ability and his future. “My grades were OK,” he said, “but in America you need stellar grades to get into medical school. I had a GPA of 3.6. I needed 3.7 or better. They look at the numbers but they don’t look at the person.”

But Brad was determined to become a doctor. If necessary he would apply to a Caribbean medical school. Just when all seemed lost there was a call from Loma Linda. Someone had dropped out of first year; would he fill that position? He was twenty-three.

Finally Brad had found purpose and direction and by graduation had met his wonderful wife-to-be, Phyllis. “She was in the mold for missions,” he said, “and I knew this was the litmus test. If she didn’t have a heart for missions, we couldn’t form a marriage.”

As a new graduate, Brad found that he was still striving to perfect his salvation. “And I knew I just couldn’t do it in my own strength,” he said. “We prepared for mission work and we stayed out of debt. Finally I came to the view that training and teaching was the only way to go. I had been to Africa and seen how medical missionaries could so easily burn out and I wasn’t going to do that.”

In California he entered a family medicine training program with the University of California San Francisco, and met senior members of the American Academy of Family Physicians. They were planning a training program for doctors in central Asia and invited Brad to join them.

“So in 1996, five years after the Soviet Union broke up, I went with a team of Christian doctors to Central Asia. We were basically teaching specialists to be generalists, as the Soviets had only trained specialists. Doctors were not trained to look after families.

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