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Sometimes church surprises you.

Thanksgiving Eve was rainy, dark and cold and I didn?t want to venture out for worship but I went anyway, to Dorsey Emmanuel UMC, which was having a joint service with other churches, including a Korean congregation.

I had never heard 'Lord, I Lift Your Name on High,' sung in Korean as teenagers danced. I was also surprised at the soprano in the choir, who I had actually seen a time or two in our neighborhood grocery story.

She looked perfectly normal, but when she opened her mouth, she seemed to lift the whole church in her descant that swirled around the voices of the other singers.

As they sang, I imagined her to be some kind of super hero - mild-mannered by day and able to lift whole congregations with a song. People in church are like that. They surprise you with their gifts.

One of the highlights of the service for me was unintended. It was a typo in the bulletin. Instead of referring to God as 'Father,' the bulletin led us to call God 'Gather.'

I love this image, which takes on whole new meanings during this harvest time.

We had all, of course, that evening 'gathered together to ask the Lord?s blessing.' But I was also prompted to think about the things that I gather as I journey through the Discipleship Adventure. There are feelings and expectations and artifacts that each define who I am as a child of God.

Among these many relics are my great grandmother Melissa?s Bible, a needlepoint of the Lord?s Prayer that my grandmother Lillie Reed made that hung over her bureau, and a note that my father wrote after he lost his ability to speak. It says, 'think positive.'

I wrap the sentiments that these objects evoke around me like a quilt. Gathered together, they provide absolute certainty that, with God, all things are possible.

On Thanksgiving Eve, I began to wonder about the people sitting around me in the pews. What things did they gather to illuminate the presence of God in their lives? What tokens of faith did they hold dear?

The next morning in the newspaper, I read a reflection by the Rev. Elizabeth Kaeton, an Episcopal priest in New Jersey who seemed to be reflecting on the same thing.

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of her ordination, her congregation gave her a quilt, made with squares that reflected different aspects of her ministry.

'I?ve been struggling to put into words the power this quilt has had on my soul, to absolutely no avail,' Kaeton wrote.

But the meaning did become clearer to her when she heard the investiture sermon of the first woman presiding bishop in the Episcopal church, which was delivered Nov. 5 at the National Cathedral in Washington.

The bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori, spoke about being gathered into the heart of God. 'Our natural home is in God,' she said.

'Then I got it,' Kaeton wrote. 'There are no words for this quilt because it is an icon in fabric. An icon is a prayerful way to image God.'

Meditating on icons helps the viewer to gain a deeper, fuller, and often more spiritual understanding of the meaning of Jesus? incarnation. They gather us into the heart of God.

When one broadens the definition of icon in this way, she can begin to see icons in unexpected places.

They are revealed, as Kaeton says, in the clutter that collects on the front of the refrigerator, in photo albums and scrap books and a hundred other places.

'They stand like silent shrines, waiting for us to discover them, so that we might stop and meditate on the mundane yet holy revelations in the common stuff of our daily lives,' she wrote.

For me, they?re often found in the pages of my journals, where I collect typos from worship bulletins and interesting clippings from newspapers.

In my journal there is now pasted a copy of a block from Kaeton?s quilt. It is embroidered with the benediction she gives to her congregation each Sunday.

'Life is short and we do not have much time to gladden the hearts of those who make this earthly pilgrimage with us, so be swift to love and make haste to do kindness.'

I?ve pasted in the bulletin from the Thanksgiving service at Dorsey Emmanuel UMC, with a note in the margins from comments made by the Rev. Jody Jessup.

Jessup encouraged all those present to 'be the answer to one another?s prayers.'

It?s a surprisingly simple sentiment, with a power and glory to it that could lift an entire congregation and shape the world.