Migrants in Trucks and Missions in the Jungle

Ghostly images of migrants crammed into two tractor trailer trucks caught my eye in yesterday’s news. Five hundred and thirteen people grouped into stifling space and privation had paid about $7,000 each for the long haul. Many stood upright and maintained balance by holding a dangling rope.

Hoping to make it to the U.S. and a better life, they were caught in Tuxtla Gutierrez, Mexico in the state of Chiapas on their way to the U.S. border by way of Pueblo, a larger city to the north. High resolution X-ray technology saw through the trailer sides and revealed the images of the bodies and their crunched posture.

For a number of reasons I feel compelled to comment.

First, the wrenching trials these people suffered underscore the blessings of God we have in America. From many parts of the globe, millions yearn to be here instead of there. Most of the captured migrants came from Guatemala, others from El Salvador, India, Nepal, China, the Dominican Republic and Honduras. Among them were 32 women and four children. All had shelled out their meager savings, hazarded their lives and risked deportation for just a single chance to cross the U.S. border into real or imagined economic freedom. They will return to the hopeless prospects in their homelands.

Before retiring from active broadcasting, TV news anchor Eric Severied said, “The fact is, that if all immigration barriers were lifted around the world, a huge parade would form and begin marching in our direction.” We may not be perfect in America, but we are way ahead of whoever is in second place. We are blessed here because of our biblical base.

Second, I have been in both those towns mentioned in the news. Years ago, I accompanied a Wycliffe Bible Translators tour of Chiapas mission outposts in southern Mexico with several other U.S. pastors. On our way south to Chiapas, two of us left Mexico City and traveled by bus to Pueblo for an overnight with a dear missionary who had shared Christ in that metropolitan area for many years. Then it was on to Tuxtla lighting on a dirt runway and watching peasants slave all day for a few cents.

From there, we flew to Wycliffe’s Jungle Camp buried a few miles from the Guatemalan border and finally into the deepest jungle where Phil & Mary Baer had been laboring for 15 years among the Lacandon Indians, the remotest tribe in North America. The flight had taken us across a highland ridge where a church held about 600 believers that Sunday morning. They were the fruit of years of missionary work by Marianna Slocum.

We heard her story back in Mexico City on our return trip. A missionary already, Marianna became engaged to Bill Bentley, also serving in Mexico as a missionary. They were to be married on the next furlough. Six days before the wedding, Bill died in the night from undiagnosed heart problems. At the funeral, Marianna declared, “I will go back and do the work of both of us.” And she did.

All this took place in the general area where two crammed semis attempted an expensive international human smuggling operation. Such search and thwart operations are always newsworthy for a ravenous media. The soul-saving rescue on the lonely ridges and jungle pathways of the ends of the earth seldom attract much attention, but, in the ultimate liberty in the Kingdom here and Heaven there, it is more significant for the stressed peoples of the globe. Hopefully, some on those trucks know Christ as Savior. If not, they are double losers—nothing in time and nothing in eternity.

We should be earnestly praying for the global Gospel outreach of often obscure missionaries who bear the bread of life, first for hungry souls and second of a new life better oriented toward making the best of difficult situations. And let us not forget to pray for those entrusted with immigration policy, that it is fair, just and productive.

Dave Virkler