Blog Warts and All

By Dr. Neil Gilliland

Our old friend was sick…very sick.

To say, he was an old friend is anemic; he was our confidant and mentor. Even more, our old friend Dan Cronk was our hero. And now he was very sick. We knew the time for him to transition from the temporal to the eternal was imminent. It was one of those moments where we wrestled with wanting to go see him but not wanting to say good-bye. It would probably be our last earthly visit with the man who taught us and to whom we owed so much.

The sky was as cloudy and gray as our hearts the day Mark McPeak and I drove across town to see Mr. Cronk. Ms. Trula welcomed us with her usual warm smile and embrace. She thanked us for coming and brought us a cup of tea. Mr. Cronk was in an easy chair. His voice was so weak that he spoke into a tiny microphone connected to a little cassette player. My heart ached to see the once robust man so weak. Mark and I soaked in every word we could as long as his voice held up. Finally, we realized that his energy was spent and we needed to say good-bye. Neither of us wanted to speak and how do you say thanks to someone who shaped your life so much. We choked out a few words and he hugged us.

As we were leaving, he began to cry. We had seen him cry before. Often in class, when he spoke of India and her people, tears would fill his eyes. Those tears showed how deep his love for people was and inspired these two fledgling missions students. But today’s tears were different.

We thought we understood his tears. Mark gained enough composure to say, “It must make you proud to see Neil and I following after the Savior and carrying on your legacy.” He hugged us again and in his typical direct fashion said, “No, that’s not why I am crying. You two know me, warts and all, and you still love me.”

I couldn’t say anything. It was him who loved us so much...warts and all. It was that moment that perhaps he taught us our greatest lesson about missions. We simply need to love people…warts and all.