An Experience In The Mountains Of Southern Mexico

Life Has Been So Blessed Interesting...

In my younger years, as a Pastor, I often made missions trips into Mexico to preach and to learn more about a prospective mission work. On one such occasion I flew into Cuerna Vaca south of Mexico City to attend a missions conference at the missions ministry of Ralph McCoy. Ralph spent his life winning souls to Christ and establishing churches all over that part of far southern Mexico in its land mass bending eastward.

On our first day of the conference, Ralph told the gathering of Pastors that a crisis had arisen at the Childrens' Home ministry his family had founded in a mountain village about 150 miles south of where we were meeting. It seems the Catholic Priest there had told the villagers that those Baptists running that home for homeless children were going to burn his Catholic church and build a Baptist one. Of course, the villagers were up in arms and were threatening to burn the Childrens' Home. So Ralph asked for two volunteers to accompany him and his pilot to fly down and try to appease the Priest and his parish, which he considered to be everyone in the village. 

The next morning another Pastor and I joined Ralph and the pilot on their flight into the small village of Tlapa, in the Guerrero Mountains, where the Rio Tlaplaneca ran through it. About noon we flew over a mountain about 2500 feet high and the pilot immediately dropped down the eastern side of the mountain to a dirt road, leveled off and landed on the road which was angling up the next hill. We taxied up to where the man in charge of the Home awaited us with an ancient car. We spent the rest of the day encouraging the fearful missionaries and talking to the Priest, who would not be pacified but ranted about Baptists raising his Mexican children in his village. Fortunately, we were notified the next day, after we left, the Government told the Priest to calm the villagers or he would be responsible for any further trouble.

We had dinner and breakfast with the children ... black beans both times. When I got back home, we sent support for a wider variety of food for those beautiful children, some of whom went on to follow the Lord in His service.

The day before, when we were approaching Tlapa, the pilot had switched from the near empty gas tank to the near full one so we wouldn't have any problem when we took off. And, after landing, he had parked the plane crosswise to the road and on a slant, leaning downhill. That was a mistake. While we were there, the full tank on the uphill side drained down into the near empty tank on the downhill side. So when we took off, on our return to Cuerna Vaca, we were on the now near empty tank. 

We took off going down the hill and turned sharply to the right to miss the mountain and headed home but didn't get many miles when the engine began to sputter. Our pilot began to adjust the throttle, check his gages and look desperate. He turned and said, "We're going down". The engine was so noisy that the other Pastor shouted to me, "What did he say?" I answered, "We are going down".... and, of course, he began to pray .... as did we all.

Then the engine stopped and the desperate pilot was frantically switching things and futilely looking for a place to land. As a last resort, he switched back to what he thought was an almost empty tank and the engine caught and we began to climb out of a valley between two mountains. Only then did he realize what had happened.

I have flown in small planes eight or ten times but have never had a good experience in one until Fred Good and I hired a pilot to fly us over a large glacier in northern Canada or Alaska, I don't remember which. If you are in Tallahassee, ask Fred about that flight. Fred has the gift of storytelling.