She looks around the room and smiles. It's an unusually large crowd. "This is the only time that we will worship together as a group."

Thousands of people rush through Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport every day, but in this small chapel where the New Testament sits next to the Quran, people take a moment to pause. And think. And pray.

The Sunday service in Terminal D is a place where lives intersect for a fleeting moment, then separate to all parts of the globe. It's a place where people find solace amid chaos. But most of all, it's a place where Mrs. Trittin believes tiny miracles happen every day.

"The people that come often come with a lot of baggage," says Mrs. Trittin, 53. And not just duffel bags and rolling suitcases. Emotional baggage.

With the anonymity of an airport, they feel more at liberty to open up.

But few know the baggage Mrs. Trittin has carried in her life. "I don't tell everyone I meet," she says.

The lonely traveler

Mrs. Trittin treks toward the airport shuttle, balancing a silver chalice of grape juice atop a CD titled Saving Grace and a copy of St. Joseph's Sunday Missal.

She's on her way to the next service, in Terminal B. D/FW Airport has a chapel in each of its five terminals, and on Sunday mornings, some offer 20-minute Catholic and nondenominational services on the hour. Mrs. Trittin is one of 14 airport chaplains who volunteer part time to lead the services and provide spiritual support to travelers.

As she makes her way to the Terminal B chapel, security guards and airport employees wave or stop to chat.

The chapel is empty. She waits 15 minutes, but no one shows up.

She heads toward the chaplaincy's office. Inside, a poster reading "We pray for our military" hangs next to an American flag.

When the war began in Iraq, Mrs. Trittin was among the airport chaplains responsible for seeing off troops and praying with their families. At least one chaplain sees off every flight.

But she doesn't do that anymore.

"I finally burned out. I couldn't deal with it anymore. And that's my own weakness," Mrs. Trittin says. "It was when we started bringing them back, taking them off the planes – you know, the bodies. I just lost it."

Instead, Mrs. Trittin reads the prayer request cards that troops fill out before a flight. Sitting at the desk in the chaplaincy's office, she picks up a thick stack of prayer requests and silently flips through them.

I request your prayers for:

My future wife, reads one, That she stays strong and finds the Lord. Pray for her family. Pray for our love to stay strong.

Protect and bless my family, reads another.

Mrs. Trittin pauses a little longer on the next one:

I've been lonely all my life. I often don't think it's possible for anyone to love a man like me.

"People are so lonely," she says. "It's just amazing the pain that people carry with them."

Tears well up in her blue eyes. She understands that loneliness.

A divine appointment

Mrs. Trittin always wanted children, expected them, but in her early 30s, she realized it was not possible.

As a Southern Baptist, she was raised to believe that if you're a good Christian, if you pray hard enough, everything will work out. This time, it didn't.

Around the same time, her graphic design business fell apart. She struggled to make payments on her house. And she felt isolated from her family.

She was angry at the world and angry at God.

Then one Sunday in the summer of 1998, she and her husband met a mother with her daughter in a canoe in the middle of Lake Palo Pinto.

"Mom, you better stop talking because it's time we better go to church," she remembers the little girl saying.

Something clicked. Mrs. Trittin and her husband began going to the little girl's church in the nearby town of Santo – which means holy.

Mrs. Trittin has remembered ever since the words of the seminary teacher who led the church's services: "If there's someone here who has given themselves to Christian service and has never followed up on that, today is the day that you better get with the program."

She enrolled in seminary school that fall, working part time in her husband's dental laboratory to support herself. But in 2003, when it came time for an internship, doors were slammed in her face. Women were not supposed to be ministers in the Southern Baptist tradition.

And then a spot opened up at the airport chaplaincy. To Mrs. Trittin, it was fate. Growing up in the area, she and her sister used to ride their horses in the empty fields where the airport now sits. When the first terminal was built, they would wander around the gates for fun.

In this transient place, Mrs. Trittin found her home.

"Sometimes people come in and say, 'Well, when are you going to get a real church?' "

But Mrs. Trittin doesn't want a congregation of 20,000.

Sometimes one person is enough.

"It's almost like a divine appointment," Mrs. Trittin says.

Terminal B

After looking over the troops' prayer requests, Mrs. Trittin realizes the silver chalice of grape juice is missing. She heads back to the Terminal B chapel to find it.

When she gets there, a middle-aged brunette is sitting in the front row. Mrs. Trittin introduces herself. She asks where the woman is going, where she's coming from, and is there anything she could pray with her about?

The woman hesitates.

"Yes," she whispers in a cracked voice. She pauses again and starts to cry.

Her mother is dying of cancer and refuses to quit smoking despite pleas from her family.

"We did not part on the right terms," the woman says through sobs. "As much as I love her, I can't watch her destroy herself."

With a stained-glass panel of the cosmos above her, Mrs. Trittin listens to this stranger confess her worries.

"That's hard, very hard," says Mrs. Trittin softly. She closes her eyes for a prayer.

"Dear God, thank you for her love of her family," she says. "I pray, dear God, that you will be with her through this."

At the end, she places her hand on the woman's back.

"Was it by accident that I forgot this?" Mrs. Trittin says, pointing to the silver chalice.

"I don't think so," the woman says.