Mercy Wings

Mercy Wings pilot Alex Fedorenko pilots his plane above central Mexico.

Mercy Wings
Written By: Jeff King
Photos By: Ron Storer

The hill has no name. It rises out of the dreary Mexican desert, a mile south of a small village. The only distinguishing mark on the 4,500-foot peak is a crude pagan altar near the summit.

But for a few minutes in 1999, this forgotten mountain became holy ground to a small Christian medical team, which was preparing to minister in the town below. As they huddled on the slopes to pray, missionary pilot Jerry Wiley whispered a prayer with the faith to move a mountain: Lord, capture us in your glory as You did for Moses on Mount Sinai.

“People fell on their faces. It stayed with us about 15 minutes. As fast as it came in, it went away the same way. It just melted away.”

As the doctors were scattered around him in prayer, Wiley looked down and saw fog emerge from the backside of the mountain and move toward them. “It comes straight up and covers the whole top of the mountain,” says Wiley, who works with two other pilots in an aviation ministry called Mercy Wings International out of Durango, Mexico. “It almost hooked around and met in front of us. I closed my eyes and lifted my hands. I felt a coolness.”

The cloud was so thick that Wiley hardly could see the other team members around him. But everyone was impacted by God’s presence.

Jerry Witt, Wiley and Alex pause for a few moments of prayer before flying.

“There wasn’t a dry eye in the place,” Wiley says. “People fell on their faces. It stayed with us for about 15 minutes. As fast as it came in, it went away the same way. It just melted away.”

Signs and wonders are not foreign to these missionary doctors and pilots, who have seen the dead raised and sick healed in the Mexican outback. But this was such a powerful demonstration of God’s sovereignty that they returned to camp shaken and weeping. Team members said later that the Lord spoke specific things to them individually on the mountain.

“It was an awesome, awesome thing,” Wiley says. “God put a stamp of approval on what we were doing. We felt a great breakthrough in that village.”