At Center Court 1-18-10

Questa Colorado, Central Mexico

Generally, Americans think of Mexico as dry desert with sparse cactus and too many drug lords, especially in light of several years of drug wars that have killed six thousand people. Tourist agencies warn people to travel in groups, not show their money, never ever drive at night, and look poor. Travelers tell countless stories of being forced to pay bribes by police in Mexico City or having to pay off the customs officials to avoid being locked up and having the key tossed away. Sanborn’s built an empire insuring and protecting Americans and their stuff from Mexico.

When I think of Mexico I recall visions of snow-capped mountains a mile higher than anything north of the border, emerald cloud forests with huge ferns and orchids, the most incredible sunsets one can imagine, stunning Mayan and Aztec pyramids, world class art, and sublime colonial architecture. It is further from Tijuana to Tulum by car than it is from Seattle to St Petersburg, Florida. Mexico is a vast land of volcanoes, mountain ranges, rain forests, haciendas, and deserts on the Pacific Rim of Fire. The Rim of Fire gives Mexico its 19,000-foot snow-clad volcanoes.

Yet, far more memorable than all these captivating sights is the most sincere hospitality I’ve encountered in four decades of journeys to fifty nations. It is home to one hundred eleven million people, most of whom have long since learned that relationship and hospitality come before just about everything. Anyone who has gone to the trouble to get out of Acapulco, Cancun, Cozumel, or any distance past the Texas border will know that Mexico is clearly an exceedingly friendly part of the universe. Having long since lost count of how many times I’ve been in Mexico, I am less likely to get lost there than in South Carolina, where I have lived for nineteen years. Throughout the vast reaches of Mexico one finds a welcome, second to none. Sometimes it seems out of this world.

Between the vast western Sierra Madre Occidental Mountains and the even more impressive Sierra Madre Oriental range in the east is a high desert plateau at about 7,000 feet. After saying a prayer for the state of one’s cooling system, one can drive from Monterey to Saltillo in little more than an hour. That short journey will take one from the hot oppressive lowland deserts to the high plateau with a gain of more than a mile of elevation. Often that physical ascension yields an even greater one in my spirit.


For forty years a hardy group of us has ventured into the remotest regions of Mexico, deploying mobile surgical hospitals throughout Mexico. In the context of doing so, Magi often came out of the woodwork, bearing the most amazing gifts. Occasionally, they show up on basketball courts. The sublime climate on that desert plateau must be a magnet for Magi. For certain, there are Magi all over that country; we’ve encountered many of them over the years. But this region seems to bring out the best of them.

Gifts given by these Magi are incredibly diverse, sometimes of no significant material value, but of staggering personal value. Others have vast material value given with the greatest of personal sacrifice. One is quickly reminded of the widow who put her last two copper pennies into the temple treasury, in an era when women had no pension, 401k, social security, or other form of financial safety. Personal sacrifice is a dazzling dimension to gifting, especially when done to total strangers. A personal experience with this stands in a class by itself.

During late December we were in a place called Questa Colorado, bringing Christmas cheer to a desperately poor desert town that had no possibility whatever of getting any kind of health care, let alone extensive surgery. But, even the poorest town has a plaza of some sort, even if it is nothing but a broken slab of concrete on which to play basketball. The plaza in Questa Colorado was decidedly minimalist, being such a broken slab with layers of red desert dust swirling over its surface, the nets long gone from the hoops.

One morning a poor woman showed up on the remains of the basketball court, wanting to sell an embroidered tablecloth she had made. It was a stunning piece of work and represented months of effort. What she was asking for it was the equivalent of about ten weeks’ pay for a day laborer. Knowing she had a lot of time invested in her craftwork; what she was asking for it was more than fair.

In many lands, including Mexico, it is insulting to not barter, lest the sellers get the idea their wares and currencies are of trivial significance to well-heeled Americans. After just enough bartering to be polite, we agreed on a price and I told her I was going to go get some money out of my toolbox in the clinic lab and would return at once.

I returned in a matter of ninety seconds to find the woman had sold the cloth to a local man, who certainly did not give the appearance of having the wherewithal to drop a couple months’ wages on anything, especially a tablecloth. I doubted if this day laborer even had a table to eat on, yet the man was standing there holding my coveted prize. If there was ever a time in my life that I was really glad I kept my yap shut, this was it. Inside I was ready to detonate and tell that seller and this man off. My Spanish being spartan at best, my mouth doesn’t work nearly as fast as it does in English. By the grace of God, the lag time between my brain and mouth was long enough for me to smarten up really fast and stay silent.

While standing there with a fist full of pesos figuring out how to run my mouth in Spanish, this short weather beaten little wisp of a man turned to me and held out the magnificent cloth to me and in Spanish said, “I wish to give this to you as a gift for coming to our poor dirty little village and helping us. I don’t understand why you would come to our village to help us.” Christmas is why. It was and is all about Christmas. It always will be.

As I write this, I am tearing up, tapping back into an incident now twenty-eight years distant, realizing that I had been presented something of value infinitely beyond gold, frankincense or myrrh. The vastness of this man’s gift sunk in and I suddenly felt like melting down into those broken bits of concrete. This man had labored under an incendiary desert sun for seventy days to buy a gift for a complete stranger who happened to be on his town’s basketball court bartering with a street vendor.

Even greater than the gift of the nearly luminous cloth was the shimmering generosity of this old man’s gratitude. In a competitive corporate world where everyone else is the enemy, especially anonymous strangers, gratitude is so rare. Gratitude of the order I experienced from this man that morning is no less magnificent than the gratitude written about in the second chapter of Luke. Tradition tells us three rich guys traveled a very long ways to deliver their own opulent gifts to express their gratitude for the most profound of all gifts to the world - a Savior. And so did a little Mexican laborer.

Embroidered in royal purple across the top of this precious cloth in Spanish is the phrase, “God is my strength and fortune.” How true it is, but it might have just as well said, “God is my muzzle.” I almost told off a Magi.

If you want proof the universe is friendly, just go to center court in Questa Colorado.