mexico
Word to the wise: when you step off the airplane in Mexico, prepare to be deceived.
The plane lands, and we share a conspiratorial smile, Kevin and me. It is the smile of sixteen years as best friends, our souls all blended together; the smile that travels all the way up to our eyes, glinting there; the mature reflection of the romance that buckled us into the same seat on the roller coaster all those years ago. Sometimes I bite my lip when I hear that marriage isn’t supposed to be passionate after a while. So many of life’s loops and valleys, and I still want to spend every minute right beside him. God started this, and glory…does He ever know what He’s doing.
We gather our carry-on bags and patiently move along behind the others, the guy who plays harmonica on the beach, who spoke to Kevin in soft, weathered tones as we flew, just in front of us. He looks over his shoulder as he passes through the doorway and says, smiling at Kevin, “Hope you enjoy your vacation.”
When our row mate boarded the plane in Dallas, he had more or less tumbled down the aisle and into his seat. Things fell from the plastic grocery sack he had tied to a small suitcase that he bounced behind him. He made me smile, this man, visions of Pig-Pen from Peanuts floating through my mind. He looked as though he moved in his own cloud of disarray. He looked the way most of us feel, especially when our children are with us. Finally, he sat down with a jerk next to Kevin, and all thumping, muttering, and clattering ceased. He looked up, his eyes weary. His story was hard to follow, but Kevin listened in his easy way, expecting nothing, open. By the end of the flight, the man had handed Kevin his passport and asked him to read off the number, head bowed over an immigration form. I smiled listening to them, knowing that Kevin would leave the man with peace. Kingdom now. See that man, the flight attendant, the elderly ladies ahead of us, every face: Christ.
In a few steps, we walk away from the plane. We lose sight of our new friend between the walkway and baggage claim, but his hibiscus shirt and plaid shorts are easy to pick out in the crowd around the conveyor belt. Before he leaves with his bags, he turns to Kevin one last time with a friendly smile and a wave. He says, “If you make it to Yelapa, ask around for the harmonica player.” We hoist our bags and head for customs, thinking that if Yelapa is as eccentric and tucked away as our friend suggested, we’d probably fit in. Nonetheless, our plan is to check into Dreams Puerto Vallarta, find a chair on the beach, and stay there. We arrive tired, hungry for rest.
At the customs desk, seeing that our forms are in order, the attendant points to a red button and beckons Kevin to push it. When he does, a red light blinks, and this means that security will inspect our bags. The lady at the inspection table smiles at me before she remembers her official capacity, then presses her lips into a thin, authoritative grimace. Moments later, our bags returned, we walk down a long hallway and through some doors. Into a den of wolves.
Kiosks line both walls of the room we enter, plain white, each with about five people standing behind them. The people, men and women, are leaning over the tops of empty counters with pens in hand, calling to us with urgency. They are wearing white button-down shirts with collars, navy pants, the same colors worn by the security officers who checked our luggage, but without officer’s patches. In the middle of the room, two lines of similarly dressed people stand in our way, stopping us as we walk through, and immediately I feel cautious.
“Sir, sir…come here. We must help you, you must register here to meet your transport from the airport. Here. Here! Stop. Stop! You must register first!”
A lady, looking very official, stops Kevin and insists that he visit a kiosk to the right of the room before we move further. Two things helped. First, I had read all of the information on our travel documents. Someone with a sign, wearing a shirt bearing the name of the tour company with whom our online agent had contracted was meant to meet us. Second, Kevin and I traveled to Cancun years ago, and someone had warned us before we left for that trip. “Whatever you do, don’t stop until you get past those people. They look like airport employees, but they’re not.”
Years turn memory to fuzz, but I heard the vague echo of that warning as the lady who had stopped Kevin pushes us in the direction of a kiosk. “No, I don’t think this is right,” I say to him. “Where’s the sign? These people have no sign, no company shirt.”
Kevin considers this, hearing me, unsure, and turns toward the guy leaning over the counter. “Be careful,” I say, and he nods. I love that Kevin never wants to dismiss another human being, never wants to be unkind. For a few moments, we listen, as the guy behind the desk asks where we are headed and who will be taking us there. “We have transportation from the airport through the booking agent,” Kevin tells him.
“Yes, yes, I see. They’ll be here in ten minutes.” Then the man at the desk starts showing Kevin a map, telling us that it’s his job to welcome us to Mexico, see if he can help us in anyway, offer us a few gifts of greeting. He’s half way through asking Kevin what time we would like to have a complimentary breakfast when everything comes clear, and we both know in the same instant. Kevin looks at me, thoughts pass.
Pretense and deception always leave a bitter taste in my mouth. The Enemy mimics what’s holy—kindness, generosity, service—carefully extracting the Sacrifice. He looks so official, pretends authority, gesturing. And this is how I learn, the Spirit nudging, showing visually. It comes to me, standing there, that Christ never looked a thing like the religious elite of His day. He never tried, never had to pretend to have the authority that was just His.
The guy in front of us works hard, grasping, urging quickly as though reaching for something just shy of his fingers. Kevin leaves the map he’d been handed on the table, right in front of the guy with the pen, who’d been circling things faster than we could process them. “I think I’m going to just leave,” Kevin says carefully, with measured firmness.
“But wait! Sir, wait!” The man says, feigning confusion. But now we are moving purposefully toward the double doors at the end of the room. This room, the people, the urgency—all a trick, a trap, and it is foolishness to remain. We know who these people are, what they do. They promise things—excursion credits, breakfast, hospitality. They convince you to meet them so that they can take you to another resort for breakfast, and then they take up an entire day of your vacation aggressively badgering you to buy a time share. Word to the wise: when you get off the airplane in Mexico, prepare for this deception.
Another man from the middle of the room moves toward me, “But you must register first!” I lift up my hand, despising the need to be so forceful. “NO. We.are.leaving,” I say, still walking forward.
In moments, we are through the double doors, leaving the frenzy in our wake. And just three feet away, I catch a glimpse of a man standing calmly with a sign, wearing a company shirt with a logo, bright orange. I point at him, and he smiles. “You are the person we’re supposed to meet.”
Another couple finds him about the same time that we do. They interrogate him ruthlessly, ask to see where his name and picture are on their travel documents. He is calm, but keeps telling them, “Don’t worry, we’re the good guys.” After the chaos we left behind us in the other room, I can’t blame them for wanting to be certain.
Just after Christ offered His disciples the Supper, washed their feet, and said the last things, the things to prepare them for the rip of His death, the surprise of His resurrection; the things He knew they’d repeat and rehash, remembering; just after that, the disciples said,
Now we can see that you know all things and that you do not even need to have anyone ask you questions. This makes us believe that you came from God (John 16:30).
It occurs to me, thinking of this, how lost I would be apart from the Spirit’s testimony. Regular people, truly seeking, must have dwelt in a quagmire of confusion over His identity before the Cross. Was He? Wasn’t He? “He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him (Isaiah 53: 2),” and He came from Nazareth (“Can anything good come from there (John 1:46)?”), and He came proclaiming scripture fulfilled in their hearing (Luke 4:21). Just as out of place among them as a sun-withered harmonica player on an airplane. Those holding all the travel documents, the ones who made a life studying them, they should’ve known the man they longed to meet, the fulfillment of every prophecy in the flesh. But the others…no wonder they had questions. His own disciples really didn’t know He was the I AM until He walked through doors that were locked, ate fish in front of them, showed them the scars in His hands, the hole in His side (John 20,21). I see this, know this, listening to that couple pummel the driver with questions, trying to be sure.
It isn’t until we are in the airport shuttle and on our way, weaving madly through traffic on crooked, crowded roads with no marked lanes that I finally sit back, let the sweet heat blanket me, and relax. We see bicyclists traveling in the opposite direction between two buses, swerving through narrow space, and I gasp. A lady parks her car on the side of the road and opens her door into the middle of traffic, and no one seems surprised except for us. She doesn’t even seem to be breathing heavily when she stands up (having bent over to pick up the keys she absently dropped in front of her in the street). It occurs to me that this place belongs to them, with all of its haphazard traffic. They know its rhythms, just as we know the rhythms of our own whirlwind, having weaved through them so long that everything about this chaos is familiar. They feel no urgency or alarm, despite the madness.
At the hotel, we check-in and inhale the subtle waft of tropical flowers, glimpse the lift of butterfly wings, hear the ocean crash. “Welcome home,” the desk agent says, smiling, and I chuckle thinking of my friend, who says I become “other worldly” on the coast. The desk agent gestures toward a friendly lady, who “will show us to our room,” but instead the lady shows us to a desk and starts promising to offer us all the gifts the people at the airport offered us if we’ll come to her promotional breakfast, the one offered by the resort, instead of going with the people from the airport. She blinks with frozen smile, surprised when we tell her that we left before the people at the airport could finish their sales pitch. She asks if we have kids, tells us about hers, tells us it will be good for her if we go to the breakfast offered by the resort. I smile, and then I tell her that I don’t get a vacation like this one very often and that I would not like to spend even a minute of it listening to another sales pitch.
Instead, I spend the week on the beach with Kevin, reading a stack of amazing books, eating delicious food. And somewhere along the way, we meet Salazar, who works at the resort. I had just read about Brother Andrew in God’s Smuggler (a powerful book that warrants its own review) meeting a kindred spirit:
As we neared the front door, I glanced for a fraction of a second into the face of the man who had arrived at the precise moment I did. And at that instant I experienced one of the common miracles of the Christian life: our spirits recognized each other (157).
Salazar, a man with a grin behind soft eyes, speaks English well, though some things he only knows how to explain in Spanish. Over the course of the week, we share neither long conversations nor many personal details, but the instant we meet him, we recognize him. I know of no better way to describe it than to echo Brother Andrew’s words. Our spirits recognize each other. He calls Kevin his friend, stops by briefly to say hello, smiles with instant familiarity. When we leave, we say goodbye and Salazar hugs me repeatedly, asking when we might return.
And this I love about traveling: Everywhere we go, we recognize other souls, the Spirit testifying to the reflection of the Savior’s face. And the relationships, full of all that’s holy, also brim with sacrificial grace.
