BELLAIRE, Texas — She lost her only son and husband within two years of each other – a blow that might destroy others.

But dwelling on sadness just isn’t in Virginia R. Collins’s nature.

“I am spiritually driven, and I always will be,” says Collins, a petite Texan lady who attended her voice lesson at Rice University in a black pin-striped suit last week, her voice raw from cheering on Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton at a campaign rally the night before.

The former school principal, a member of the United Methodist Church in the middle class Houston suburb of Bellaire, stayed up past her bedtime to see the candidate. But it was worth it. She said Sen. Clinton hugged her and posed with her for a picture and described her as “congenial and compassionate.”

“I think she’s a woman of high standards,” said Collins, who is herself a woman of standards, having taught and worked in the public schools of Houston for 41 years before retiring in 2002.

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Lakewood Church in Houston.

HOUSTON — On the eve of the crucial Texas primary, the place to be seen was not at a campaign rally. It was inside the country’s largest church.

Sunday, former President Bill Clinton, daughter Chelsea Clinton and their Secret Service entourage attended Lakewood Church, whose 47,000 members praise God in a converted sports stadium, once home to the Houston Rockets basketball team.

I decided to drop by a Lakewood service, not because of the Clintons – I learned of their presence that morning after they’d cleared out – but because I was curious. In a country populated by Spanish missions, churches converted from houses, quaint New England-style chapels, storefront churches, temples, synagogues, large modern worship complexes, and metal warehouses with crosses and hand-painted signs on them, how do people worship God in a sports stadium? Who goes there? Why are megachurches so popular? What draws people to Lakewood’s message?

Parking my rental car in Lakewood’s underground garage, I followed a stream of churchgoers. They were all startlingly young – in their 20s, 30s or early 40s. As a group, they were ethnically diverse. Some carried Bibles, held hands or pushed baby strollers the length of the underground garage, up a concrete ramp and onto a street where Lakewood employees kept foot traffic moving and offered rides.

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SAN ANTONIO—Under the bright glare of Texas sunlight, Tim Weste greeted voters heading for the polls in a church on the suburban outskirts of this Texas town last week.

Weste, a community college teacher, is young, single, clean-cut, and earnest. His politics are straightforward and socially conservative: He opposes, on religious grounds, abortion and marriage between gay people.

As a conservative Christian and a Republican, Weste, like others I interviewed in Texas, considers himself a faith voter and is an example of the range of voters who say they choose their candidates and their issues based on religious principles.

“I am a Christian. I believe in reading the Bible and doing what it says,” said the 29-year-old, who comes from a long line of Baptist preachers but is one of a growing number of young people who’ve abandoned smaller, more traditional churches for the nation’s megachurches.

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I stopped home in Boston just long enough to do laundry and readjust my course before traveling to California with the idea of exploring how faith communities addresses immigrants.

The image of Texas's evangelical megachurches kept intruding on my thoughts long after I left the state. What was up with that crowd of young families pushing strollers as they made their way toward the former basketball stadium that is now Lakewood Church, the largest church in the country? What is it that draws so many young people? What is it about an inspirational God-is-Good-You-are-Good message that strikes a cord with Americans?

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SAN JOSE, Calif.— You could sum up much of the Rev. Joseph Leon’s theology with one phrase: Help the stranger.

“We have to be out on the mission fields,” said Leon, pastor of Pueblo de Dios, a congregation whose 160 members come largely from surrounding immigrant communities. “We are soldiers of the Lord, and we have to be out in our community, finding out what are the needs.”

For Leon, the work of the Christian faithful is to be disciples of God, to minister spiritually and practically to those in need -- including illegal immigrants.

The communities surrounding Pueblo de Dios ("House of God" in Spanish) are largely Latino and Ethiopian. There are men in steel-toed boots and blue jeans, looking for work outside Home Depot. There are boys and girls who Leon knows with the right encouragement might grow up one day to become professionals and good husbands and wives. There are young couples loading trucks with furniture and all their belongings, preparing to move on in search of the next opportunity.

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SALINAS, Calif. — The way to Steinbeck Country winds down the Pacific Coast past fishing villages, past fat sea lions lounging on weathered docks, past brightly painted shacks promising the local delicacy, deep-fried artichokes.

A sharp turn inland reveals the vast furrowed earth that gives birth in the California sun to rows of lettuce, artichokes, strawberries, cauliflower and other crops that come to rest on America’s dinner tables. It is not uncommon to see men and women dressed in sweatshirts, hats and other work clothes, advancing down field in waves as they pick crops. Large tractors weave in and out of traffic on residential and commercial streets. Outside local stores, objects depict the Virgin Mary as well as the revolutionary Che Guevara. Signs for Castroville, the next town over, proclaim it to be the artichoke capitol of the world.

This valley where novelist John Steinbeck lived, the land he wrote about, has been home to Sister Lydia Schneider for 40 years. She belongs to the order Sisters of Charity of the Infant Mary. Gray-haired, blue-eyed, and fair-skinned, Sister Lydia tends to the needs of a mobile and ever changing Hispanic community.

“If we recognize one another as having God present in each other, why should it matter where this other person’s come from?” she said. “We share a very basic bond of belonging to the human race.”

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Marina Ocampo

SALINAS, Calif. —The beautiful grandmother Marina Ocampo has burst into tears, waving off the camera.

This is not the first time I have unintentionally made someone cry. Last week it was the Rev. Joseph Leon in San Jose, recalling a man who has been working in this country for eight years but is not sure, now that he’s ready to go back to Mexico, how his wife who he has been supporting all these years will receive him.

This time, it was the simple question: Why are we here?

I never know what I’m going to get when I ask this question. Some people, like Tim Weste, the San Antonio evangelical I talked to earlier this month, haven’t really thought about it. Some, like Jim Oldread, the homeless man I interviewed last year in Boston, say we’re here to “do good,” to help other people.

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SALINAS, Calif. — The vision came after failing to cross the border for a month.

Migrant farm workers Ana Dolores and her common-law husband Marcos Barajas had taken a chance returning to Mexico to visit her parents after 10 years in America.

The couple’s children were still in the United States. Now they didn't know when they would see them again.

“It had been a month and I couldn’t cross,” she told me and a friend Isaiah Guzman, who grew up bilingual and agreed to help translate. “We couldn’t cross, and my husband had said that we had to go, we had to because our children were here.”

Dolores begged God for help. “Praying with all my heart, I asked him,” she said. “He told me that I would dream how he would answer my prayers to be able to cross.”

That night, she said, she had what she believes was a divinely inspired dream. In it, she said, she saw clearly how they would cross the next day. And that’s exactly what happened, she said: Because of faith, they crossed the border the following day in the backseat of a Datsun, no questions asked.

“I think that then is when I learned that with faith everything is possible,” she said.

To Dolores, an out-of-work strawberry picker who grew up in Mexico and came to this country seeking work, faith is simple and all encompassing. God is in everything, in any place, on any occasion, she said during an interview inside a one-room makeshift church.

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