c. 2006 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) How fast does a prayer travel? From a Florida hospital, parents sent out a cry for help for their 2-year-old daughter, 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, Tenn., and then zipped to Hazel Green, Ala.

From his home in Hazel Green, Jim Stephenson, a gospel signer with a deep e-mail bank, said a prayer and forwarded the message to his list. In less than a day, more than a thousand people all over the country received the message asking 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.

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Stephenson and his wife certainly do. They have plenty of stories that continue to prove to them that miracles still happen. Watching Dianna’s brother survive a brush with death will do that for you, he said.

“The doctors shocked him back, but warned us he might remain in a coma. They said there could be brain damage,” Dianna Stephenson recalled. “The pastor, my mom and dad and Jim _ we all started praying right there in the family waiting room.”

They let others know of the crisis. Then they continued their prayers, sensing the growing web of prayers stretching out across the country from computer to computer.

By evening, Dianna’s brother had awakened and knew his wife immediately. By the next morning, doctors removed his breathing tube. In the next week he got steadily better, with no residual problems.

That, Jim Stephenson said, is a miracle healing.

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“And we’re not talking about TV ministers, we’re talking about local people,” he 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, Ala., 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,” Hopson said.

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 has never seen that sort of problem.

The problems he sees listed are for 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.”

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Hopson said he enjoys the way e-mail has multiplied his prayer list, but he doesn’t think the increased number of prayers increases God’s concern for a particular situation so much as it increases the individual prayer’s own faith.

“He wants us to pray because he’s our father,” Hopson said. “He wants us to pray and commune with him. And the more we pray, the more we recognize other people’s problems _ it’s all spiritual, and it doesn’t cost us nothing.”

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When Hopson receives a prayer request, which he does from friends or from other members of 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,” Hopson 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.”

(Kay Campbell writes for The Huntsville (Ala.) Times)

KRE/JM END CAMPBELL