Sunday Rerun: Hannah is a palindrome, as is Kayak

 I don't get too deep in theological matters here, as I have this belief that everyone is entitled to believe as they do.  But I would like to share this aspect of my belief in God.

I think He has the greatest sense of humor in the world, since He invented humor.  This is why he gives us eczema in places just beyond where we can reach to scratch.

I think He loves sports and happily watches men and women on His earth who can run and throw and catch and do things the average person can only dream of doing.  I do not believe that he takes such an avid interest in the outcome of a game between two last-place teams in mid-August that he adversely affects the outcome of that game, so please, losing pitchers, spare us the "It was God's will that I give up a three-run homer in the ninth inning" piety.  By August, He is already focusing on college football, anyway.

And I don't think He ever told anyone to be stupid.  Which leads us to the story of the Gastonguay family,  a sun-baked group from Arizona.  Sean Gastonguay,30, and his wife Hannah, 26, just couldn't stay here in America any longer, what with all the horrible things that go on.  Abortion, taxes, homosexuality, and what they call the "state-controlled church" (?) pushed them over the line and onto a barely-seaworthy sailboat.  They took Sean's father and their two daughters, one three, one but an infant.

Hannah told the AP that they decided to take a leap of faith and see where God led them.  Experienced sailors will tell you, the first thing NOT to do when boarding a sailboat is to take a leap of faith onto it, especially if your destination is the archipelago nation of Kiribati, best known until now for their basketball team's stunning upset of Belize in the 2008 Olympic basketball semifinals.

They spent 91 days at sea, 90 of them harrowing.  They encountered rough seas, which you have to count on, if you're leaving Arizona by sailboat.  The Gastonguays were down to just a little bit of honey and water, and were eating whatever fish they could find in the middle of the Pacific Ocean (which is where vast schools of breaded stickfish, all headless, measuring one inch by five, swim past the Gorton and Van de Kamp Islands, easy prey for the hungry).   There's an app for that sort of angling!  Fish.net!

Destination: Kiribati
Arrival: Chile
Missed it by: That much

The mariners were eventually picked up by a Japanese cargo ship and dropped off in Chile, where a police official said, "They were looking for a kind of adventure; they wanted to live on a Polynesian island but they didn't have sufficient expertise to navigate adequately."

I don't presume to tell God what to do (who am I? A televangelist with bad hair or something?) but my hunch is, the next time He tells the Gastonguays to do something, he will add a little lecture about not being so dumb.