Gary Crocker's Blog

May

2022

Mel Crocker’s Personal Testimony

By Gary Crocker

In the spring of 1985, I invited my father’s novelty trio to perform at an ice cream social for the junior high at Westminster Christian Schools where I taught. They called their group at the time “The Three Mistakes”. It consisted of my Dad, Mel Crocker, his brother Glenn, and friend Bob Barnhart. Following the performance, I interviewed him about his path to Christ.

Mel Crocker is interviewed by son Gary, telling of his resistance to faith despite multiple brushes with death in and after WWII.

Gary: I’ve asked my Dad to stay after to share a little bit with you, because I think he has something he can share that might affect you as you are growing up.

Mel: They’re pretty well grown up now as it appears to me.

Gary: Yeah. Right.
Dad, could you share with them how you felt about Christianity during the period of time that I was their age?

Mel: [pauses] I can, but I’m not very proud of how I felt about it. Gary gave his heart to the Lord when he was about nine years old, and during that period of time, and before, really, I was too busy to come to the Lord, to confess the Lord. Too many things to do. I felt that it was for someone else, not me. In fact Gary, when he was about eleven, he came to me and asked me to see if I would consider becoming a Christian. I told him I didn’t want it.

Gary: What was it that changed that attitude?

Mel: Well there were a number of things that changed it, but it all came pretty much to a head when in January 1966 I had a heart attack. While I was recovering from it, my sister, [Louise Cornwall] who is visiting here from Phoenix right now, convinced me that I should come to her apartment for my recovery period, which was to be rather long. By this time, things were starting to stir inside of me. I saw, being the Christian woman that she was (and still is) and I thought that perhaps there was something that maybe I had been missing. So I went to her apartment and during the several months that I lived with her, she read to me, and I started reading and suddenly many of those things that I thought were so important to me were no longer important to me. And her niece, who incidentally, is a very good friend of your principal [Esther Dieffenwierth], Judy Cornwall, was going to Southern California College [now Vanguard University] at the time. She came over and sat on the corner of my bed and would read to me and pray for me. Things started turning around. I started to see where my life had been pretty much a dismal failure, a very lonely life even though I had beautiful children, I was still very lonely. Things started to change for me.

Gary: During that period of time, in fact two days after your heart attack, I went into the Air Force and had to hear about a lot of this second hand – not second hand, but long distance. I have a letter here that I got from Dad when I was in training. You can see that it’s pretty battered. I kept it in my wallet for the remainder of the time I was in the service. Do you want to read that section, or do you want me to read it?

Mel: You read it.

Gary: This is talking about that period of time that he was just talking about. He said,

I’ve finished reading Luke in the Bible and very interested in reading the rest of the way. I’m desperately groping son, and Reverend Sells, through his very frequent and welcomed visits has helped me a great deal; also Sis and Tom, through their sincere faith have been a great help to me. But of all, it goes without saying that your faith and your dogged determination has made my pride in you blossom into the feeling that soon, I too will join you as a Christian. I ask you to pray that I can soon overcome whatever power it is that is restraining me and keeping me from asking His guidance and blessing.

Gary: I had a hard time with that. I got a little emotional with it. But that heart attack wasn’t the first time that you had a brush with death. There were a couple of other times that I’ve heard about many times.

Mel: I think the Lord was dealing with me for most of my adult life. But I was running helter-skelter, and I wasn’t listening, and I always turned Him away. But during the War, World War II, I was in the South Pacific. But prior to going to the South Pacific, I was in training at the university of Idaho for radio and radar airborne flight communications. A couple weeks before I was to graduate with a class of about 125 sailors, all of them in communications, I got the flu, a 3-day bug. Because I couldn’t take the exams with the rest of the students, I was held back two weeks. My friends went on to Memphis, Tennessee. Two week later, I followed them, and we went on to further and more extensive training at Memphis. They went from there to Florida and I went to San Diego. Later they caught up with me in San Diego. In the meantime they had been assigned to a carrier based aircraft – fighter bombers. I was assigned to the big boats, PBY patrol aircraft. We had a going away party – we didn’t know exactly what day or what hour they were leaving, but we knew they were leaving soon for the South Pacific. Three weeks later I got a newspaper and their ship had caught a torpedo aimed at the battleship Mississippi and they were destroyed. Every one of them was killed.

[Note: This was the USS Liscome Bay, which sank in the Gilbert Islands on its first and last mission November 24, 1943.]

Mel: [continues]: He was dealing with me then, but I still didn’t respond. The tug wasn’t strong enough. Later, when in the South Pacific and flying patrols I was out on a long night patrol and became violently ill with malaria and they had to bring the plane back and bring me back in. I was grounded for quite some time during recovery process I was going through, my plane and my crew went out on another night patrol and got into a storm and crashed into the side of a mountain and everyone was killed. But I still wasn’t getting the message.

But the Lord wasn’t quite through with me. After I came back and after we moved down here I stepped out of a telephone booth at an intersection in Long Beach seconds before an out of control automobile totally demolished that phone booth. I mean, I wasn’t six to eight feet away from that phone booth.

So, yes, I’ve had several brushes, and finally God LET me have a dandy of a heart attack. [smiling] And that was when I finally got the message that it was time to start thinking about what He was trying to say to me and what does that mean?

If I might just say one or two comments. Gary did all he could, and my sister before my heart attack, did all she could to make it possible for me to find my way to the Lord. But I rejected Him, I rejected until finally it happened. The main point that I’m talking to you right now is that if among you there is a parent or a relative or close friend who is rejecting the Lord; you may be heart-sick that they won’t come to [tape ends here].

Gary, 2022: The VHS tape ran out at this point, so I’ll try to recall what he said, at least for that first point, and give a couple of thoughts of my own 37 years later.

As I recall, his first point was to never stop praying for your loved ones no matter how resistant they seem. He might also have mentioned the importance of living out your faith in the practical daily situations we find ourselves in so that those around us who might be resisting Christ can see that He is real.

A point I would like to add is that God used many of His people to get the message through to him. He used their lives and their prayers.

Post script

At the time of this interview Dad was nearing completion of a book about the PBY aircraft and its crews during World War II. It was published in 1987 as Black Cats and Dumbos; World War II’s Fighting PBYs. It was well received, and a second printing was released before it went out of print shortly before he passed in 1989. Many of the crew members whose stories were told in the book were disappointed that it was no longer available, and it became my ambition to get it back in print. We did that in 2002 as print-on-demand. It’s still available through Amazon and sells about 100 copies a year.

If you would like to read the eulogy I gave for him at his memorial service in 1989 you can find it at https://www.crockermedia.com/family/beliefs/eulogdad.htm

Jan

2021

Love Kindness

As we see our culture move farther and farther from biblical principles, I’d like to recommend Dr. Barry Corey’s book, Love Kindness, (2016, Tyndall House Publishers). Dr. Corey is the president of Biola University.

He notes that Christians, and especially American Christians have become combative in recent years battling the cultural drift. “The ‘culture wars’”, he says, “have done little to change our society, and we’ve lost many if not all these wars. As a result, the church too often is marginalized and mocked, and increasingly people are viewing the Bible as just as intolerable as our aggressive tactics.”

Corey proposes kindness instead. “To be Christian, kindness must shape us and define us. But this powerful virtue seems to be characterizing us less and not more. We have lost an understanding of the power of kindness, mistakenly dismissing it as fluff or flat. Kindness needs to be rediscovered.”

The kindness that he proposes is not to be confused with niceness, which just goes along with the flow with an equally soft core of softness in what it accepts anything that comes along.

“Kindness,” he says, “is fierce, never to be mistaken for niceness.” … “Kindness is the way of firm centers and soft edges.” It’s not the hardness of firm centers and hard edges, or the weakness of spongy centers and soft edges. Corey’s book is “an attempt to explain what this means – not so much to define as to describe it as I’ve seen it in different people in different settings.”

I plan to re-read it as encourage other Christ followers consider it.

Because He lives,
Gary

Aug

2020

My Greek at the Retreat Incident …

How I tried to act intelligent and demonstrated otherwise …

Several years ago, I was asked to be a group leader at our church’s annual men’s retreat. The retreat that year invited men from another nearby church. Part of my Biblical Studies degree at Biola included two years of New Testament Greek. I remember the last day of that second year, the professor congratulated us. Then he warned us that we were now quite dangerous, since we thought we knew Greek and were likely to misuse it.

Not long before the retreat, our Sunday School class had featured a guest missionary who shared that he had new believers read through First John several times, each in a single reading. I started to do that and realized that it might be a good opportunity to refresh my Greek, since it had now been several decades since those classes.

I had been doing that for a week or so, looking up words in the abbreviated lexicon in back of my Greek New Testament. I had donated the textbooks from the class to a book drive for India, so I wasn’t getting very deep into this study; nothing into grammatical syntax or conjugation of verbs. Since I had just begun this not-so-systematic review when time for the retreat came, I decided to take my Greek New Testament along, hoping to spend a little quiet time with it in the mountains.

The men were divided into groups, including men from both churches in each group. The program included assemblies of everyone for worship and a message, followed by break-out times for the groups to discuss questions about the topic. One of the questions asked us to discuss a certain passage of scripture. I don’t recall the verses. What I do recall is that it centered around three words or phrases and we agreed to consider them on our own and come back to them at our next group session.

I thought, “Cool! I brought my Greek New Testament with me. I’ll look up those words and come back with hopefully an intelligent, if not impressive answer. I took Greek!” So, I did. Well, I did the first part. I looked up the words, and I prepared myself for an observation about them. Those observations, however, turned out to be not so intelligent, and I certainly did not make a good impression when I shared them with my group!

Remember that I was the “leader” of this group. When we regathered for our next breakout, I shared my “insight”: “All three of these words have the same root.” One of the guys from the other church said, with authority, “No they don’t!”

What I think I can say about New Testament Greek without getting myself into more trouble is that it is a very precise language. That’s because a lot of the nuances of meaning are communicated in changes to the spelling of words, depending on how they are used in the sentence. So, the reader can tell if a noun, for instance, is masculine, feminine, or neuter; singular or plural; whether it is the subject or belongs in the predicate; and a few other things that help communicate details of the author’s meaning. English has very few such devices. Articles, for instance (a, an, the). That’s it. Just three. Greek has 24, at least! I seem to recall that there are more, but remember, I’m trying to stay out of trouble.

I still had a bit of memory about those articles. That involved a lot of memorization after all. But I forgot that the same changes applied to the nouns they referred to as well. In fact, the articles changed because the nouns made those changes. That was the case in the passage we were discussing. They all had the same ending, not the same root as I boldly professed in the group.

My proclamation might have had its intended boost to my ego had there not been a teacher of New Testament Greek in my group.

I can only imagine the effect this had, not only on my reputation, but the reputation of our church. “They must let anybody teach!” “What else has this guy been teaching?” I have not seen this guy since that retreat nearly a decade ago. I assume that I have since been used as an example of the very thing my own Greek professor warned about the dangers of thinking you know more about the language than you do. I hope so. I tell it myself if I bring up a Greek word when I teach. Unless I am quoting directly from a real authority, I warn the class that I know just enough Greek to be dangerous.

So, why do I re-expose myself to this humiliation? I do so because our believability is one of the most important assets we have. When we speak beyond our understanding, and are caught, we ruin our credibility. We become known as someone who treats the truth carelessly and who spreads misinformation. Anything else we say is rightfully received with suspicion. How can we be trusted with anything else that we say?

When we share something that we see on social media, we also share in its credibility, whether good or bad. We build or damage our own credibility based on the truthfulness of what we share. With most of what I see, it damages it.

If you can’t, or don’t want to take the time to investigate the claims of a post, for the sake of your own credibility, don’t repost it. Your reputation is too valuable to entrust to someone else.

If the guy who had the misfortune of being in my group at the retreat reads this, and I hope he does, I want him to know that he taught me a powerful lesson. Fortunately, I had only begun my trek back into re-learning Greek prior to that blunder. And I hadn’t been in the practice of making such references to the text in my teaching. Because of that incident and realizing that I am an “old dog”, I decided any further effort to become expert in Greek would make me even more dangerous. So, I didn’t take it further. I now resort to quoting from established experts who know what they are talking about. I do wish that I had kept up with Greek all along and had deepened my understanding and proficiency of it. But I’m truly thankful for the lesson learned. Thank you, brother, whoever you are.

Because He lives,
Gary Crocker
August 2020 (edited 8/8/20)

Jun

2013

Masks: A Recent Personal Revelation

One morning several months ago, I got a phone call from a family member. She indicated that she was struggling with her faith. Prayer wasn’t “working” and she was questioning her salvation because of it. She cited the last third of Proverbs one:

“ Then they will call on me, but I will not answer;
They will seek me diligently, but they will not find me.
Because they hated knowledge
And did not choose the fear of the LORD,
They would have none of my counsel
And despised my every rebuke.
Therefore they shall eat the fruit of their own way,
And be filled with to the full with their own fancies.” Proverbs 1:28-31 (NKJV)

She reasoned that God was ignoring her prayers because of her refusal earlier in life to be obedient. She was convinced that she must not therefore be called and saved. In Romans 9 she had convinced herself that she fit Esau’s profile and fate rather than Jacob’s.

As I tried to reassure her that her concern itself argued against her conclusions, and that she was listening to the enemy rather than God. She responded with a collection of evidence that she was convinced proved otherwise. Then she nearly brought me to tears when she said, “I could never be like you. You’re different. You became a Christian when you were four-years-old and have been steady ever since. You don’t doubt and you’ve been a good person all your life.”

Oh! What have I done? Gary, you hypocrite! You’ve led your family, and possibly others, to believe you’ve had it all together spiritually for fifty eight years!

She, and I’ve learned since, others, have thought that my life has been one of continuous spiritual growth. In a sense it has, but not like they have thought. They thought that, whenever God spoke I listened and obeyed. They should have noticed clues to the contrary if they had watched my life more closely.

Before we got off the phone, I told her that first of all I began trusting Christ at the age of nine – not four. Of course that was trivial. Far more important was that I have had, and still sometimes have doubts and some rather significant questions as well as things I don’t understand about God and the Bible. I don’t have everything figured out. I am tempted in the same ways everyone else is and have failed. I still fail. I am ashamed of my thought life. I have a morbid dread that someday I’ll have dementia in a way that past and occasional current thoughts that I can now suppress will flush out for others to hear. I really want my last words to glorify God, not shame Him.

I realized that day that I was wearing a mask. People – especially most of my family – were seeing only the result of continuous confession of the same kinds of sin they were struggling with. They weren’t seeing my struggles. Whether consciously or subconsciously, I was hiding all that from them and giving them the impression that I’m different from them.

That doesn’t mean that everyone needs to hear details. Satan has a way of taking some public confessions and using them to talk us into giving ourselves permission to sin in the same way.
“I’ll just confess it afterward like they did, and be forgiven.” That’s partially true, but there is more than one sin involved when we do that – the more serious of which is a slap in the face of our precious Savior, nearly – if not in fact, blaspheming His suffering. How can we treat Him so flippantly??!!

Some may really be like what people think I’m like in my thought-life, but I suspect there aren’t many.

We need to be able to be imitated. But we need to be careful that our disciples know what they are imitating – not a perfect life, but a life that keeps short accounts with God. A life that consistently runs back to God – confessing sin, claiming God’s promise of forgiveness, and moving on in renewed obedience.

If all we communicate to our friends, to our family, to our children, is the victory and they don’t see the battle, we are going to continue to mislead them.
• Some will respond like the dear one who called me, putting us in a category of people exempt from their kind of battles.
• Some will hide their own struggles and imitate our outward actions, make their own masks and continue to struggle alone, usually in defeat!
• And others will see through our whole charade, call us by the hypocrites we are, and have nothing to do with Christ.

You may be looking at another brother or sister and thinking: “They’ve got it easy. They’re not going through what I am. They don’t have the thoughts I do. They don’t have the questions I have. They don’t have the doubts I have. No wonder they’re so victorious. I could never be like them.” If so, please realize that you’re probably not seeing their struggles.

Hebrews 10:23-25 – “Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for He who promised is faithful; and let us consider how to stimulate one another to love and good deeds, not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another; and all the more as you see the day drawing near.”

Brothers and sisters, we need each other. We need to come alongside each other, struggle together, hold each other accountable, and be honest with each other.
I need you – you need me.

Dec

2012

Joseph and the Holy Family

I’m struck this Christmas morning by the important role of Joseph in the holy family. Even the virgin-born Emanuel grew up in subjection to two parents. I see, in the holy family, the importance of family structure. Although he had nothing to do with the conception of Jesus, Joseph was still referred to as his parent and even his father,(Luke 2:41, 43, 48); and he had the responsibility of an earthly father over his family, (Matthew 2:13-23). Jesus was under His parents’ authority before, and even after the age of twelve (Luke 2:51-52). God, Himself placed Himself under human parental authority.

Oct

2012

Jumping Spider

Ready to Jump — “Back away! I’m ready to jump!

Mar

2007

Too Cool! (No April Fool!)

Our son Eric and grandson Ethan had the privilege in the spring of 2007 of going one-on-one with Magic Johnson!

(This was originally posted on April 1, 2007.

Jul

2012

Vince Morris’s Prayer

The following prayer was found in Vince Morris’s well-worn Bible and printed for the bulletin in the bulletin for his memorial service on June 30, 2012. Vincent Morris was vice president of student affairs at Biola University for more than 20 years and an admired Bible teacher at the Evangelical Free Church in Huntington Beach and Bethany Bible Fellowship. I’d like to adopt this for myself.

Forbid Lord that my roots become too firmly attached to this earth, that I should fall in love with things. Help me to understand that the pilgrimage of this life is but an introduction, preface, a training school for what is to come. Then shall I see all of life in its true perspective. Then shall I not fall in love with the things of time, but come to love the things that endure. Then shall I be saved from the tyranny of possessions which I have no leisure to enjoy, of property whose care becomes a burden. Give me the courage, I pray, to simplify my life. So may I be mature in my faith, childlike but never childish, humble but never cringing, understanding but never conceited. So help me, O God, to live and not merely to exist, that I may have your joy in my life and in my work. In your name who alone can give me joy, peace, balance and zest for living the Christ-filled life, I pray. – Vince Morris 3/06/93

May

2012

“Waiting” for the Holy Spirit?

The statement in John 7:39 — “. . . for the Holy Spirit was not yet given, because Jesus was not yet glorified”— does not pertain to us. The Holy Spirit has been given; the Lord is glorified— our waiting is not dependent on the providence of God, but on our own spiritual fitness.

Oswald Chambers, My Utmost For His Highest, May 27.

The Life To Know Him

May

2012

When the crisis comes …

“When the crisis comes and courage is required, God expects his people to have such confidence in Him that they are the responsible, reliable ones.” Oswald Chambers

Post script

How I tried to act intelligent and demonstrated otherwise …

Our son Eric and grandson Ethan had the privilege in the spring of 2007 of going one-on-one with Magic Johnson!

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