From the Desk of Jeff King

Wing and a prayer

The peak in central Mexico is nameless and barren. A crude pagan altar sits near the summit. But to a small party of Christian missionaries praying on its slopes in 1999, the ground was hallowed. That's because of the outcome of Jerry Wiley's audacious request: Lord, capture us in Your glory as You did Moses on Mount Sinai.

As Wiley prayed, a fog-like cloud emerged from the back of the mountain. It rose quickly and engulfed the team of doctors and nurses. "The fog almost hooked around and met in front of us," says Wiley, a pilot with Mercy Wings International, a mom-and-pop aviation ministry out of Durango, Mexico. "There wasn't a dry eye in the place. People fell on their faces. It stayed about 15 minutes, then melted away."

Signs and wonders are not foreign to missionaries serving in the Mexican outback. But this was such an unusual and powerful manifestation of what they believed was God's presence - a cloud appearing out of nowhere on a clear, sunny day - that they returned to camp shaken and weeping. They had gone to the mountain to pray before opening a clinic in a nearby village. "It was an awesome thing," Wiley says. "God put a stamp of approval on what we were doing. We felt a great breakthrough."

The glory cloud has not returned, but Wiley and his flying partners – Jerry Witt and Alex Fedorenko – rely of God's provision and protection on every mission. Witt has been shot at by drug runners and robbed by bandits. The pilots thread their single-engine planes over and around mountain ridges, through steep canyons, and land on primitive airstrips. "I have one airstrip I call the aircraft carrier," says Witt, whose friends call him Indiana Jones. "It has a launch ramp. You literally go off the side of a mountain. A down draft can put you into a mountain side and there is nothing you can do." When high winds prevented Witt from reaching another mountain airstrip, he prayed in the cockpit for God's help. The wind, which had gusted all night and morning, stopped suddenly and the plane landed safely. A half hour later the wind returned and blew for another 24 hours.

Ministering in a region as large as Louisiana, the pilots help organize medical and dental clinics. They support outreach teams by airlifting cement, lumber, medical supplies, gasoline and honey bees. Their most daring project is dropping small, solar-powered radios by parachute in areas inaccessible to vehicles. The shortwave device receives gospel messages from High Adventure Ministries in Los Angeles. Pilots release the radios from a cockpit window, dodging mountain ridges and rooftops by as little as 20 feet. Villagers approach the unmarked cargo cautiously, but are visibly moved once they look inside. Each package also includes a gospel tract, introducing many to Jesus Christ for the first time.

Wiley once dropped a box containing a Bible to a farmer plowing his field with oxen. As Wiley circled overhead, the man picked up the Book, looked up and waved as if to signal him to land. "It tore my heart out," Wiley says. "I said, 'God, what I'd do for a helicopter right now to go lead that man to Christ.' The man took off his big-brimmed hat and put it over his heart, letting me know he appreciated the gift. In these hills many have never seen a Bible."

Witt estimates Mercy Wings has distributed 1,200 radios by air and several thousand on foot. Occasionally he will hear reports of God touching lives in isolated outposts. A woman in her 60s was healed of an degenerative disease while listening to her radio. The program instructed anyone with an affliction to lay one hand on the radio, the other hand over their body, and to trust in Christ. "She received healing instantaneously," Witt says. "This is the middle of no man's land. She had suffered for 40 years. Witch doctors couldn't heal her. Now she understood that this little book in the box was a portion of a book they kept mentioning on the radio called the Bible." The woman began a quest to find a Spanish Bible, even though she could not read. She obtained one, somehow, and asked the Lord to teach her His Word. Nine days later she was reading Scripture to relatives.

Although the pilots have seen God work other miracles – healing a boy from a venomous snakebite and raising a clinically-dead girl – the field of aviation ministry is neither romantic nor glamorous. Witt, Wiley and Fedorenko work in mountains as high as 13,000 feet and canyons twice as deep as the Grand Canyon. In some remote locations, Indians live in caves and wear loincloths. "Not too many people want to rough it and pay the price to work in such difficult areas," says Witt, who receives funding from friends and family in the United States as well as donors in Mexico. "When you fly and see these huge canyons littered with thousands of huts and little trails going up and down, you realize it's going to take more than conventional transportation to reach these people. The Spanish conquest under (Hernando) Cortes (in 1520) drove people out of the flatland, and this is all that's left. One canyon is 11,000 feet deep and has 13,000 people living in it."

Another challenge is ministering in an area that historically has been hostile to evangelical Christianity. Witt's father, Jerry Witt Sr., died when his plane crashed in 1964 while dropping gospel tracts in central Mexico. An eyewitness claimed the plane was belching smoke before it crashed, adding to speculation that it was shot down from the ground. The charred corpses of Witt and a co-worker were pulled from the wreckage and delivered to a nearby mining town, where they were tied to chairs in the main plaza. Children were released from school and promised ice cream if they would spit on the missionaries. Within three weeks, two men suspected of persecuting evangelicals – a Catholic priest and city official – died suddendly. A heart attack took one, an auto accident the other. "It is a graphic demonstration of God's vengeance," Witt Jr. says. "One man was buried before my father was."

Witt and Wiley both have survived close calls. Witt was traveling with a relative on a logging road when he spotted an oncoming driver waving out the window for him to stop. Witt pulled over, and the stranger warned the men that an ambush was waiting for them a few miles down the road. Witt thanked the man, turned the car around and said to his brother-in-law, "I think angels drive green Dodge pickups. I've never seen that man before." In the air, Witt is watched closely by drug runners, government agents and Mexican soldiers. "Everybody is looking at me with high suspicion," he says. "It's hard to explain why a foreigner with a good airplane would spend so much money to take a message to people they don't care about."

Another time, God used an airplane mishap to "save my neck," Witt says. He had just landed on a remote airstrip when the wheels got caught in a muddy bog and tilted the plane onto its nose, damaging the prop and engine. Witt had to hike 43 miles through the bush to reach help. During repairs to the plane, pilots discovered damage that had been missed on earlier inspections. Had they not caught it, Witt says, the plane eventually would have malfunctioned and crashed. "When something we would normally term bad happens, we know God is saving us from something," Witt says.

Wiley received encouragement from an unexpected visitor following a near-fatal plane crash in 1976. The plane he was piloting lost power shortly after takeoff and slammed into a hill, trapping Wiley and his father. A villager pulled the men from the wreckage and transported them to a hospital. One night, as both men dozed in their hospital room, the father was awakened by a bright light. He told his son the next morning that an angel had come into the room and ministered to him from the book of Psalms. "Dad was weeping," says Wiley, who suffered third-degree leg burns and a broken knee. "He said, 'Son, the angel told me to tell you everything is taken care of. Don't worry. You're in God's will.' "

Although Wiley admits the accident "almost took the flying out of me," he purchased a new plane and returned to flying a year and a half later. He remains committed to reaching the unreachable. "We're nothing special," he says. "It's God who put this desire in our heart. Some day we'll be buried here in Mexico when our work is completed. Somebody else will grab the torch and run with it."

Behind the scenes

I met photographer Ron Storer (pictured, right) when I was a fledgling sports writer in the early '80s. I did a story on him during his training for the U.S. Olympic cycling trials. During the interview we discovered that we both were Christians. I didn't hear from Ron for another 15 years or so. He called after seeing my name mentioned in a magazine article on Christians working professionally in the secular media. We met for lunch and Ron told me about a special project he was working on: photographing the risky work of three missionary pilots in Mexico. I was enthralled. To get some of the dramatic pictures, like the one below, pilots removed the side door on their single-engine planes and strapped Ron in with a rope so he wouldn't fall out. To get the right angle on some shots, Ron talked the pilot into banking sharply over rugged terrain, exposing him to nothing but thin air below. "The second time I was in the mountains and I had (Jerry) Wiley take both doors off and that was amazing," Ron recalls. "I was hanging out the window having a wonderful time until I arrived back in Seattle the next day and realized I had a pretty good case of vertigo, but it was worth it."

Ron and I teamed up for an article/photo essay that appeared in Charisma magazine in July 2000. I did not travel to Mexico; I did my interviews by phone. This is a re-edited version of that story. Ron, a professional photographer who focuses primarily on weddings, works with ministries around the world. Wiley continues to minister as a missionary pilot in Mexico. Alex Fedorenko assists Wiley when he can. Anyone wishing to donate to Wiley's ministry can reach him here. Jerry Witt remarried and is located in Arizona doing some type of ministry at a church, according to Ron.

Perched high atop a mountain, this hut is hundreds of miles from any road. Mercy Wings successfully dropped a radio to the family after several daring attempts.

Hungry hearts

God touched a generation 10 years ago from a sleepy bedroom community north of Seattle. At the height of revival, youth services at Marysville First Assembly of God drew 600 to 800 teens in one of the most unchurched regions of America. The crowds, which included visitors from out of state, spilled into the aisles, foyer and adjoining fellowship hall. I attended many of those meetings. Although God revealed to me later that elements of the charismatic movement, embraced by this youth church, were false and exploitive, I am convinced that many of the teens had a genuine commitment to Christ. They were desperately, passionately in love with Messiah. Here are re-edited excerpts from a freelance article I did for Charisma magazine in November 1997:

• The signs of surrender are everywhere. Drug needles, hidden in a cigarette pack, are tossed onto the stage from a throng of teenagers flooding the altar. Youth pastor Benny Perez paces and calls on the youth to "get right with God." Soon the carpet is littered with marijuana and secular music CDs.

• Former gang members and drug addicts worship alongside honor students and athletes. . . . Not all the worship is thunderous. During one service the hard-driving band led believers in hushed, sweet chorus of "Jesus loves me, this I know."

• Teens are turning their homes, schools and communities into mission fields. Matt Lybarger, a drummer in the worship band, saw an opportunity when he was confronted by an angry drunk in the church parking lot. Lybarger was punched twice but turned the other cheek. He invited his tormentor into the empty santucary, where he began serenading him with hymns from a piano on stage. The man sat in a pew and wept. Lybarger then took him to dinner and spent several hours sharing the good news of Jesus Christ.

• Jammie Bigbey, 21, received Christ on a rare night when no salvation call was made. "I didn't want to die. I thought this might be my last chance," says Bigbey, who almost walked out of the service. "On the inside I asked Jesus to take my life and all this pain. I didn't want to go to hell."

• Colleen Hicks, a mother of two boys, awoke one night to find two strangers standing in her front lawn with flashlights. Jon Frederickson, 20, and his father were searching in the dark for Jon's two front teeth, which were knocked out by a friend in a drunken rage hours earlier. The yard was splattered with blood. Jon, who was nearly beaten to death, needed five hours of surgery to repair a broken jaw. Hicks befriended the family and invited Jon to a Marysville youth service, where Hicks' 9-year-old son had been healed of a back injury a year earlier. Impacted by the meetings, Jon gave his heart to Christ. "I was partying, doing cocaine and heroin," he says. "I was on the wrong path. Marysville put me on the fast track to God. I know I'm still a target for the devil – he says, 'Get that guy before he makes any more good decisions.' " Hicks fills her minivan with teens each week to attend Wednesday youth services, an hour drive from her Federal Way home. Seats in the van are reserved a week in advance.

I found that old magazine buried in my closet. I sat down and thumbed through the pages, recalling the zeal these kids had for Jesus. Some still have it. Lybarger pastors a church in Everett, Wash., and Bigbey is training to be a Navy chaplain. Frederickson married a girl he met in a Christian bookstore. He still is walking with Christ, according to Hicks.

Who is like the Lord?

Religion cannot save and man will always fail us. Only an intimate, committed relationship with Yeshua the Messiah can satisfy the soul. And it doesn't get more personal than this blog entry from Kristen at Walking Circumspectly:

As I read about the Lord, I see a God that not only deserves worship kind of by default, but whom I really like and admire. I hope that doesn't sound too strange. Granted, we only know what "goodness" is because He has defined and demonstrated it. But over and over in the Word, I see more than a loving God. He could be "loving" and not go as far as He does. I see amazing, unfathomable mercy. I don't deserve such compassion and comfort from Him – but as I come to Him, expecting a reproof or coldness, He gives warmth, forgiveness, and an open embrace. If I'm sounding like the Prodigal, it's because I am thinking of that parable. Can any of us ever read about that Father coming to greet his dirty, formerly rebellious son without tears? What have we done to deserve the ring, the sandals, the fatted calf? Nothing. In fact, we did everything to forfeit such treatment, just like the Prodigal.

And yet, here He comes to meet me, arms outstretched. I am thankful that He is who He is, even while I am everything I am.