Chapel on the 29

"How many of you are ready for 2012?" she called out in a loud voice. Those of us on the 29 bus were startled to hear someone shouting on the relatively quiet bus line. "Barack Obama is going to be your last President-- there won't be a President in 2012. 'They' are challenging Jesus the Living God and there is going to be mass destruction. Jesus is getting ready for them because he knows what 'they' are going to do."

This woman preacher had made her bus seat into her own private pulpit and us passengers were her captive congregation. One passenger smirked to a friend, another turned up the volume on her iPod. A toddler stared at the woman with his mouth agape and the bus driver peered curiously at the woman in the rear-view mirrow.

Undaunted by our passivity and our disinterest in pending doom, the speaker started singing in a surprisingly strong and beautiful voice. "How great is our God; how great is our God..."

"COME ON, SOMEBODY SING IT WITH ME!... How great is our God..."

She continued singing her contemporary chorus while our multi-cultural, traveling chapel on wheels roamed the streets of the city. While I don't quite follow her theology, I believe that her zeal, courage, and sense of the sacred came closer to "church" than many a congregation I have visited in my time.

Easter In San Francisco

Returning to San Francisco after visiting family in Stockton, I wearily rode the N-Judah on the last leg home. I perked up when two men came aboard- both wearing clunky hiking boots. They both also wore bright colored, form-fitting knit dresses, and adorable Little House on the Prairie calico sun bonnets were tied in neat bows under their stubbly chins.

As I observed them from the precarious safety of my peripheral vision I concluded that they looked like Laura Ingalls had left the Banks of Plum Creek to join the lumberjacks near the Little House in the Big Woods. At any rate, I'm certain that Pa would have offered to play fiddle for them, and Ma would have most definitely disapproved.