When I heard the news story, I was stunned.  Not because Mexicans had found a miraculous image of Jesus.  Nowadays, you pretty much can’t swing a dead cat without hitting an image of Jesus.  They’re as common as Tom Cruise placenta jokes, so that was nothing special.

No, the amazing thing about this story was that the Mexicans had found a miraculous image of Jesus in Iraq.

It seems that this Mexican guy heard a voice tell him to walk in the mountains near his village in Iraq, and he would find the image.  So he went out, and he found the image.

I was astounded.  Mexicans in Iraq?  Mexicans?!  And there’s an entire village of them?  

I went around telling people at my office that there were Mexicans in Iraq, thousands of them!  They found an image of Jesus there!  I even added my own details to the story, like how they built fortified walls with murals of the Virgin and Cesar Chavez to keep out the bombers and Kuwaiti tourists, and how their kids mixed Spanish and Arabic into a new language called Spanabic.  And though they bought houses and paid taxes, the Iraqis would still not accept them, even though they needed them to like, pick dates and coconuts and do roofing work and stuff.  I talked about how they would invite the Mexicans from Iran and Syria over for parties in the front yard, where they would play mariachi music on the oud, a traditional Iraqi stringed instrument, but it sounded more like bluegrass because they couldn’t get the tuning right.  And now all these Western Union offices are opening all over in like, Falluja and places like that, so they can wire money back to their families in the United States.  

I told all this to my coworkers and boss, and even sent an Email to my whole department, asking them to support Mexican worker rights in Iraq, because, you know, sending Email is a good way to help people in the Third World.  

Later, I decided to research it some more, because I thought this would make a great post on MiracleTorilla.com.

That’s when I found out that the Mexicans had found the image in a rock, not in Iraq.  

Oh.

Um, okay.   Never mind.