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NBC's Marianne Favro Reporting Battling a serious illness can leave people feeling helpless, but one man is helping to show patients they are never alone.
Phil Busbee is used to praying for others, he's the pastor at the First Baptist Church in San Francisco. When complications from diabetes forced him into the hospital, a pager put him on the receiving end of hundreds of prayers.
Phil Busbee, Pastor: "Probably about 30 pages a day."
Pastor Phil is benefiting from the prayer pager project. He received the pager while in the hospital and posted his prayer needs on a website. Now family, friends and even strangers page him every time they pray for him.
The pages are all numbers. Some are random. other hold meaning.
Phil Busbee, Pastor: "They type in 1-2-3, which tells me they're from our church, or they type in their phone number."
Best of all, he doesn't have to return a single page.
Leukemia survivor Scott Francis launched the program. He knows how much prayer helped him recover.
Scott Francis, Prayer Pager Project founder: "A group of people praying for you has a definitive effect on the outcome of your illness. So it helped me through it and I wanted to provide something along the same lines, only with a direct contact to the patient, so that's why I like the idea so much."
When Scott Francis first started the pager project, he had only three pagers for Bay area patients; now he has 135 in the hands of patients nationwide. While at Kaiser Hospital in San Francisco, Busbee had to have part of his foot amputated. He says one early morning page helped get him through a tough time.
Phil Busbee, Pastor: "At 2:30 in the morning, the pager started going off. And I was amazed, I was thinking, 'Wow, somebody is up right now praying for me.' That was pretty, pretty important."
important for his wife Claudia too.
Claudia Busbee, Phil's wife: "I don't feel that I have to go through this by myself. That actually people are supporting me."
Bruce Feldstein is an MD. He's also the chaplain at Stanford Hospital and Clinics. He says while most studies about the power of prayer have been inconclusive, he's convinced prayer makes a difference.
Bruce Feldstein, M.D., Chaplain: "These kind of positive things do affect the body's immune system so they have an effect. So it's good for the person's spirit. I've seen that directly."
For Pastor Phil, the beeps are a vocal reminder he's not alone.
Phil Busbee, Pastor: "I realize there are people praying for me that I don't even know."
Battery powered technology serving as a welcome reminder of a higher power. More than 200 patients have benefited from the project since 2003.
