How fast does a prayer travel? From a Florida hospital, parents sent out a cry for help for their 2-year-old daughter who was facing chemotherapy to treat an inoperable tumor that had grown to the size of a cantaloupe.
From Florida to Michigan their e-mail message went. From Michigan to Canada, Canada to Nashville and then it zipped to Alabama.
From his home in Hazel Green, Jim Stephenson said a prayer and forwarded the message to his list. In less than a day, more than a thousand people across the country received the message asking them to pray for the little girl, her parents and her doctors.
Welcome to the modern world of the old-fashioned prayer chain.
“Years ago, a prayer chain would use the telephone party line,” Stephenson said recently as he and wife Dianna recounted their experiences with answered prayers. “But with the Internet, it just multiplies.
“It doesn’t matter if you’re Baptist, Pentecostal, Catholic or Church of Christ — everybody believes in the power of prayer,” he said.
“And we’re not talking about TV ministers, we’re talking about local people,” Stephenson said. “We know of people who had had cancer, asked for prayers, and when they go to the doctor, the doctor can’t find the cancer anymore.”
But prayers for healing don’t always get answered the way we’ve pictured, warned Mike Hopson, director of communications for the Fayetteville, Tenn., Police Department.
From the 911-call center where he works, Hopson keeps a guardian angel’s view on the county. And from his computer, he forwards enough prayer requests every day to keep his own angels busy ferrying them to heaven.
But Hopson, who has also been a police investigator, follows common-sense practices. He never forwards a request with a person’s e-mail address still attached. He makes sure the only private address visible is his own.
“That way, if I send it and someone forwards it on to somebody who is maybe not a trustworthy person, they can’t see any other address,” said Hopson, a member of First Baptist Church, Fayetteville, Tenn.
Of course, since these are not requests for money, the worst that would happen with a visible address is that someone might start sending unwanted mail.
But in his years of computer-based prayer chains, Hopson said he has never seen that sort of problem.
The problems he sees listed are from people asking for support for their sick loved ones, for job problems, for someone they loved to find peace in a relationship with God. Whatever the problem, Hopson knows the important prayers deal with more than asking God for people to have an easy life on earth.
“I pray for sick people, but it may be that they need more than physical healing,” Hopson said. “God always answers prayer — sometimes just almost immediately, and sometimes it goes years down the road and then you see how it all worked out.”
When Hopson receives a prayer request, which he does from friends or from other members of a Baptist church, he says a quick prayer and then passes that on to his personal list of 29 other people who pray and forward.
“My prayers are not long, drawn-out or fancy,” Hopson said. “God created me and He created the person that needs the prayer. He knows what I need and what they need better than anything than could be said by me.
“One person can pray,” he said. “But God said where two or more come together — and I believe that the prayer chains are a form of corporate prayer — it gives it more strength.” (RNS)
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