Heather Bellamy spoke with Ern Crocker about his new book and heard some truly amazing stories.

Dr Ern Crocker

Ern Crocker was the first nuclear medicine physician to practise ultrasound in Australia. He currently lives in Sydney where he operates in a private nuclear medicine and ultrasound practice. He's also an author who's recently released 'When Oceans Roar', a collection of personal stories of people who faced seemingly insurmountable obstacles with Jesus. Heather Bellamy spoke with him and heard some truly amazing stories.

Heather: Why did you call your book 'When Oceans Roar'?

Ern: The theme of the book began when my niece's son, young Elliott, had corrective surgery for congenital heart disease at six weeks of age.

We gathered together the night before surgery and prayed for him, nursed him and committed him to the Lord. The next day the surgery went extremely well, but three hours later, his heart simply stopped beating.

They worked on him for half an hour without a result, so they put him onto one of those perfusion pumps. They told us, "We're pretty guarded about this, but we'll give it a go."

People came from everywhere to pray for him. There were a lot of people from the music team at Hillsong Church, because he's the son of the guy who does the Hillsong DVD every year. Prayers were coming in from friends and family, from Jesus Culture in the States and from all over the world.

There was no heartbeat for three days. I went in and saw him in intensive care and his monitor just showed a straight red line. He was little Elliott, only 3kgs, and we began to call him 'Elliott the brave'. We saw ourselves as on a ship in a storm. We were with him on that boat. Wherever he went, we would go too.

After three days his heart was still not moving, but on the fourth day it began to flicker, and then it started to bleed and they had to perform urgent surgery at midnight to stop the bleeding. But the long and the short of it was that he was totally healed and now he's two years old and kicking his father's soccer ball around and having a play with his keyboard.

It was an incredible journey for us all, but we came through it and thank God for it. The theme that kept us going was a song written by this little boy's uncle, Matty Crocker and two others. You may have heard this song, it's played a lot. It's 'Ocean's Deep', "You call me out upon the water...In oceans deep my faith will stand." The words of that song just carried us through, with the assurance that God was with us. So that's where the theme and the title of the book came from.

Heather: What other obstacles did the people face that you interviewed for your book?

Patient with abdominal pain in Battambang Cambodia

Ern: I wrote the book because never in my life have I known such a need for courage as there is right now.

After my first book I thought that I was done with writing, but God said, "No, I want you to write a book on courage." And He began to bring people to me with the most amazing stories.

One was a young man from North Korea who had escaped across the frozen Tumen River into China at midnight. Some of his family members had been executed and he was pursued, but he survived.

He had been told, "When you get into China, look for a house with a cross on it. The people will look after you." He found one and the people living there led him to the Lord. Now that young man sends converted Koreans back into North Korea to evangelise their families. Quite a number of them have been executed.