It is my hope that this book will encourage a large number of people to recognize that their hope lies with God, rather than with themselves.
Benjamin S. Carson, Sr.
M.D.
Director of Pediatric Neurosurgery
Professor of Neurological Surgery,
Oncology, Plastic Surgery, and Pediatrics
Johns Hopkins University Baltimore USA
Author of “Gifted Hands”
Nine Minutes Past Midnight is a compelling book, demonstrating perfectly what it looks like when the kingdom of heaven is expressed through the hands of those in the medical field. With interviews and testimonies from professionals all over the world, Dr. Ernest Crocker has courageously painted a clear picture of what it looks like when the hand of God is upon and working through doctors surrendered to Him. This book will encourage your faith as you read about the many who have encountered God and have successfully carried Him into the world of medicine.
Bill Johnson
Senior Pastor of Bethel Church in Redding, CA
Author of “When Heaven Invades Earth” and “Face to Face with God”
Dr Ern Crocker speaks from the heart with passion, empathy and experience about God’s presence and influence in his life, with other doctors and patients. In NINE MINUTES PAST MIDNIGHT he writes “ One of the richest rewards in medicine is to be able to reassure a patient and allay his or her fears. The expression on the patient’s face is its own reward. But it’s better still if we are in that place of privilege where we can sensitively share our own faith and hope, and speak into their own situation of need”. An inspirational, must-read book which I couldn’t put down.
Professor John Boyages
Director, Westmead Breast Cancer Institute
Author of “Breast Cancer: Taking Control”
Dr. Ern Crocker’s book, Nine Minutes Past Midnight, was an amazingly interesting read to me. I found it interesting to see God working through people in the medical field. Interesting to read of the miraculous interventions bringing about healings and miracles. Interesting to read of providence sometimes leading to a new lease on life and sometimes grace to die early. I have been very interested in the relationship between the spiritual and the medical in relation to healing, and have conducted symposiums in the United States on Healing: Spiritual and Medical Perspectives. This book will be recommended in my symposiums, especially to those in the medical field.
Nine Minutes Past Midnight, didn’t offer easy answers to difficult questions, but it did offer powerful examples of men and women of faith who were also highly trained professionals in the medical field living out their faith through their professions. I wish this book would be required reading by every medical school in the world. It would go far to reduce the effect of “reductionistic” tendencies in medicine, to reduce us to only the physical aspect of our lives while ignoring our spirits. The living souls God created in his image consists of more than the chemicals that make up our bodies, but also his breath of life giving us our spirit, the spirit of life. You will find this book to be a book that will touch your heart, encourage your faith, and challenge your mind. Ultimately, it brings glory to God through His servants in the medical field.
Randy Clark DMin
Founder and President, Global Awakening and the Apostolic Network of Global Awakening
What a read! From the time I started reading the experiences of Dr Ern Crocker I was taken into the world of intense, high-level medicine and life-and-death decisions. Whether or not the reader has a faith they will be attracted to the story, the skills — and the unexplainable. I am full of admiration for this wonderful and dedicated doctor who is an innovator and a delightful personality.
The Hon Alan Cadman OAM
A timely and moving book by a man of genuine eminence in the medical profession. Ern Crocker is living proof that a passionate Christian faith can co-exist with life-long belief in the scientific method. Many of the experiences which Crocker recounts – his own, his colleagues’ and his patients’ – are truly amazing. They are a testament to the awesome powers of God and to the peace of mind which comes to those who place their trust in Him. Crocker writes with humility, but his words carry authority. St Luke himself would be proud of his fellow physician.
Roy Williams
Lawyer
Journalist
Author of “God Actually”
I love stories about doctors. All my life I wanted to be a doctor, and even when that dream was accomplished, I knew that the adventure had just begun. And adventure is what this wonderful book by Dr. Ern Crocker is all about. But the adventure is not just medicine. It is the challenge of a medical life given over to following Jesus. Every story of the doctors that Ern tells about in this book is a story of the adventure that happens when anyone chooses to follow Jesus. My Father (Donald in this book) lived that adventure. Ern is living that adventure. Enjoy this book and join in the passion of this journey”.
Dr. Tony Dale
Physician
Author
Chairman and Founder The Karis Group, Inc., Austin, Texas
In a world that questions the very existence of God, a reminder that God is both sovereign and saviour is vitally important. Ernest Crocker in “Nine Minutes Past Midnight” shares his wealth of experience as a highly esteemed doctor and Christian. His hope in this book is that all people see that Jesus alone is both Saviour and Healer of the world.
Rev Canon Christopher Allan
St Andrew’s Cathedral Healing Ministry, Sydney
The book “Nine Minutes Past Midnight” is a narrative of Dr Ern Crocker’s walk as a physician asking God to reveal Himself to him in his medical practice and every day life. Dr Crocker’s charge to you, the reader, in his preface is to consider the role of God, ‘the silent partner,’ in your life. Through the pages of this book, identify with the skeptical physician and open your heart to let God reveal himself to you and you will not be disappointed. You will find that He is not only a God of history and of Dr Crocker but One who wants to have a personal relationship with you through Jesus Christ today and forever. As you share with Ern the experiences of God through the people that cross his path as a physician, I pray that you will find God to be more than a ‘silent partner in your life.’ Is it nine minutes past midnight in your life? As this servant of God, you will find purpose and fulfillment of life.
Donald R. Tredway MD
PhD, Professor emeritus and former Chairman
Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology
Oral Roberts University and University of Oklahoma, Tulsa, Oklahoma
Ern Crocker has written from his experience as a doctor of seeing God’s miracles in peoples lives. He has been able to expand on this personal experience by capturing many other doctors who share their own life experiences. Ern Crocker is passionate and meticulous about the details in the experiences he shares. He lives and breathes what he writes. I encourage you to read and be inspired so you can lift your experience up to what God’s Word says.
Peter Irvine
Co –Founder of Gloria Jean’s Coffees
Author of “Win in Business”
This book is detailed record of God’s miraculous intervention that is quite marvelous. It is made more marvelous for me, the son of a potato and pig farmer, because it is written by a highly trained medical professional, heavily practiced in the scientific process of searching for empirical evidence. Dr Crocker is as honest about the absence of the miraculous as he is about the miracle. He describes the comfort as a rational human being of learning to trust Jesus in every area of his life, family and professional career. You too will find the heart of this eminent scientist echoing the cry of the Spirit of God…. “Come now, let us reason together and join me in the relationship of the Father with the Son as a real participant.
Tom Hallas
Asia Pacific Field Director
Member of International Eldership
Youth With a Mission International
This is an inspiring and considered reflection that tells the story of one doctor and his many friends. Hear how God leads one man from work in an old pie factory, to work in central China to providing international leadership in his area of medical specialisation. This is an essential read for young doctors, and many others, struggling with the considerable challenge of integrating a passion for the science of medicine, the art of compassionate holistic care and a love of the God who has created them.
Dr Michael Burke MBBS, PhD, FRACGP, FAICD
Executive Officer
Christian Medical and Dental Fellowship of Australia
This is an inspirational book. I recommend it to all but especially to students and young professionals in health care. Over and over again it shows that God is faithful to those who seek Him and intervenes in the lives of His followers. He is the healer whether it be through medical or miraculous means. May it encourage those in the medical world to go after God more and more and see His Kingdom come in health care in the nations.
Dr Ken Curry
Health Care In Christ, Australia
I have always been intrigued by matters related to health and medicine. My childhood heroes were the medical pioneers like Edward Jenner, Alexander Fleming, Ignaz Semmelweis, Florence Nightingale and others who created breakthrough oftentimes despite trenchant traditionalism. I am no less intrigued by the Christian medical profession who on one hand exercise acute academic discipline while at the same time express great faith. To some, a Christian doctor of faith is an oxymoron in our day and age. Dr Ern Crocker in his book Nine Minutes Past Midnight, demonstrates keen intellectual precision while at the same time positioning himself in a very real faith. I love the reality of the book. I enjoy the stories of incredible medical and technological breakthrough. I am in awe when healing comes when doctors know that it was not their efforts alone that won the day. Both types are stories of Divine intervention. I am comforted that others struggle with the reality that healing is not effected in every case, either by divine or by natural means. The reality of our limitations as shared in this book, serves to remind us that there is still much to learn, and much to keep us humble, even while celebrating great success. This book and its heroes are worth celebrating.
David Crabtree
Senior Pastor, Dayspring Church, Sydney Australia
Review by Dr Colin Goodwin
The Melbourne Anglican, May 2012 p26
Rarely does a reviewer get to write about a book as remarkable as Ernest Crocker’s Nine Minutes Past Midnight. To situate this book it is important to note two things about the author. First, Ernest Crocker is a person of special eminence in the medical profession. His almost forty years of clinical practice and teaching in nuclear medicine and ultrasound, coupled with some seventy-‐five published scientific papers in these fields, have given him both national and international leadership in the fields mentioned. Second, Ernest Crocker is an Australian every part of whose professional and personal life is directed and energized by a Christian faith ever seeking strength and practical wisdom from the Scriptures and prayer. As Crocker sees it, “When we accept Christ into our lives, God gives us a measure of faith, sufficient to move on from a life of nomadic wandering and into the wonderful plan and presence that he has for our lives.”
Nine Minutes Past Midnight is essentially a compilation of interviews, conversations, and anecdotes, involving both doctors and patients. The many doctors concerned -‐ university professors, city specialists, country GPs -‐ were all committed Christians, whilst a number of the events involving some of these doctors were located in African and Asian countries. The purpose of Crocker’s assembled interviews, conversations, and anecdotes, was to set out “factual evidence” -‐ sometimes quite startling factual evidence -‐ entrusted to him by “prominent medical practitioners of sound mind and undisputed word” (thereby confirming Crocker’s own relevant experiences) regarding “the manner in which a ‘personal’ God interacts and intervenes in the lives of doctors, their patients, families and friends.” This factual evidence related to God’s intervening in the healing process today, not simply in the past. Put differently, the central theme of Nine Minutes Past Midnight is the experience by doctors and patients of God’s presence now in day-‐to-‐day medical practice as the “third person involved in patient care and in the healing process…that unseen person or ‘silent partner’.” The whole book is an extended argument for what might well be called ‘Christian spiritual empiricism’.
Formal theology is absent, the experiential impact of Bible-‐based belief is underlined, healing ministries are generously endorsed, e.g. those at St Andrew’s Cathedral, Sydney, and virtually everything that is said rests on Christian doctors’ immediate and direct ‘working’ experience of “the presence of Almighty God, sometimes as Father, sometimes as Son, sometimes as the Holy Spirit.” Nine Minutes Past Midnight is a courageous book. It lucidly, compellingly, records an immediacy of experience and emotion arising out of circumstances of great medical urgency, and often of great human tragedy as well. In it the problem of evil is faced repeatedly. Typically: “Last week they brought him into hospital…dead! We wrestled with God. Why did it happen?” Again: “How could a loving God allow something so dreadful to occur? Not only had they lost their beautiful little girl but Rosie herself had been given no chance of survival.” Sceptical opposition is taken into account: “What if [Christian belief] is all a hoax? What if it’s all a façade? What if Philip Adams is right after all?” John Boyages, Professor of Radiation Oncology at Sydney’s Westmead Hospital, said that Nine Minutes Past Midnight was “An inspirational, must-‐read, book which I couldn’t put down.” This reviewer couldn’t put it down either.