booStitch
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Jesus loves Happytown™. It said so right in the skies above Orlando last week.
Well, OK, it didn't say "Jesus loves Happytown™." But it did say "Jesus
loves you," and we've got to think the message wasn't intended for everyone
but us, ergo, Jesus loves Happytown™. We knew it all along.
A miracle? Not quite. The inspirational skywriting was the handiwork of Jerry Stevens,
the Boca Raton-based pilot behind an endeavor called Holy Smoke. No, really.
"Jesus told me to do it," says Stevens. He doesn't mean it
figuratively. "I was coming out of church one day and he told me to do it. He said, 'You have a talent for flying, you should do it for religious purposes.'"Stevens, 61, is retired
from the furniture business. He's been flying since he was 16, and specializes
in acrobatics. Nonetheless, he didn't know a thing about skywriting when he got
The Call, and had to learn from the guy who sold him a skywriting plane. "It's a
lot harder than you think," he says. Why? Because for the letters to make sense
from the ground they have to be written backwards, in a mirror image, at 10,000
feet, at 120 mph. "When I write 'Jesus loves you' it's 7 miles long," says
Stevens. Stevens says he has a hard time writing on paper. In the sky, he
turns the plane over to – you guessed it – Jesus. "He's flying the
plane. I'm just the hands and feet and eyes."
Prince Charming is forever crooning "Love is in the air . . . " to me
(usually because I'm being mean to him)
On our anniversary, it really was.
I wonder if anyone beseeching the heavens for an answer written in the clouds was taken aback?