The Miracle On The Rio Cobre

God Stories 3 – March 26, 2025

Let’s jump ahead about eleven years from last week’s Vietnam Story to something that happened to me and my friend John on the Rio Cobre Road between Kingston and Linstead Jamaica.

Jean and I had sold our business in 1975 after serving at Bible Way, the Jesus People Church in Richland, WA as volunteer staff for a couple of years. Our ministry supported a group of churches led by a Canadian missionary and based in Ewarton, St Catherine, Jamaica. Each year we sent teams from Bible Way to teach and serve in the Jamaican churches and to assist the missionaries.

Jean and I had made a two-week ministry visit to Jamaica in early 1977 to minister at an annual denominational convention and assist in several of the churches. Early the next year, the missionaries needed to make an extended trip back to Canada to take care of business and rest a bit, so Bible Way sent Jean and me to oversee the ministry in Jamaica for a month. Another couple from the church and the pastor and wife from one of our outreach churches accompanied us.

The second day after we arrived in Ewarton, after receiving some orientation and instruction on the work we would be doing for the next month, my friend John and I drove the missionaries to the airport in Kingston for their flight to Calgary and then headed back to the village.

We drove through downtown Kingston, an adventure in itself, then through Spanish Town and began making our way into the hills. For a few miles, we drove along the Rio Cobre, with a rock cliff on our left and the drop-off to the river on our right. Once we crossed Flat Bridge, the cliff would be on our right and the river on our left.

As we came around a blind curve (driving on the left in a left-hand drive car – always best to have a navigator to see what’s coming in the other lane), I saw a stalled country bus in the right hand lane right at the edge of the drop-off to the river. People were milling around the bus. Straight in front of me, in my lane, an overloaded dump truck was heading directly toward my car. We were trapped! The rock cliff on my left, the stalled bus on my right, and the front bumper and grill of the dump truck filling the view through the windshield, roaring toward me at full speed.

I think I yelled “Jesus!” (what else are you going to say?) and swerved the wheel toward the rocks on my left. Then suddenly, in my rearview mirror, I saw the rear of the dump truck roaring away from me in a cloud of diesel smoke, open road in front of me, and the stalled country bus with its crowd of passengers milling around several car lengths behind me. I quickly slowed for the sharp right turn onto Flat Bridge, crossed the river, and we made the remaining miles to Ewarton, mostly in silence, without incident.

For a tiny fraction of a second, a country bus, a dump truck, and the 1965 Plymouth Valiant I was driving all occupied the same piece of road between the cliff on one side and the river on the other side and there was no crash! One moment there was a loaded dump truck coming straight at me in my lane, with a stalled bus on one side and rock cliff on the other. The next instant I was seeing the back of the dump truck in my rear view mirror!

We finished our month of service to this group of churches in rural Jamaica, a month that included teaching and preaching, dedications and funerals, learning about a culture other than our own, and forming deep relationships that have lasted a lifetime. Then we traveled back home to the USA, to our ministry of service as part of the staff of Bible Way. But the time of serving the people of Jamaica had planted something in our hearts. We were beginning a new season of change and transition that would open up nearly two decades of overseas missionary service and lead to involvements and experiences we had not expected or imagined.

In 1984 we moved from Medford Oregon to Linstead, St Catherine, Jamaica and for the two-plus years we lived in Linstead before moving to Kingston, I drove that Flat Bridge Road dozens of times. I was 34 years old when this incident took place. I’m 82 now and I can still see the front bumper and grille of that roaring dump truck headed straight at us and I can still see in the rearview mirror the back of the truck trailing a cloud of diesel smoke as it roared away from us toward Kingston!

You know, there’s no natural explanation for what happened in that fraction of a second that afternoon on the Flat Bridge road in St Catherine, Jamaica. God saved me and my passenger and the people standing around the stalled bus and the guy in the dump truck! I believe this to be the reality we experienced!

That was the Miracle on the Rio Cobre at Flat Bridge!

Thanks for reading my story! Grace to you today!

Jim Stephens