Braedon Hembree Prayer Request Email text contributed by Lisa, 03/17/00: |
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EMERGENCY PRAYER REQUEST PLEASE READ, PRAY, THEN FORWARD. or copy and
paste &
send........
Prayers are needed for Braedon Hembree and his family.
Braedon is just a 20- month-old baby boy in Clinton, South Carolina. A few weeks ago his parents took him to Laurens County Hospital with double pneumonia (both lungs). The next night he was transferred to Greenville Memorial Pediatric Intensive Care Unit in critical condition. He is in a "coma-like" state and on a respirator battling viral pneumonia. Braedon is only 20 months old and very weak. He is recognizing voices, as his heart rate goes up when they sing/talk to him, it especially got stronger when his big sister, Krista, talked with him. The doctor says this is good and this makes him think that Braedon's brain is doing fine. However, the doctors are perplexed by the type of viral pneumonia he is fighting. There is a hole in his lung that may require surgery. Braedon, has recently taken a turn for the worse. His blood pressure is extremely high, leading the doctors to think he is having seizures or strokes. He now has 18 chest tubes and lots of scar tissue building in his lungs. The right lung has no healthy tissue at all but at this point he would not survive a lung transplant. He is still on life support and may be on it for a long time. The family appreciates all your prayers and they continue to have lots of hope for improvement. I am told the family's faith is such that they are expecting a miracle soon. Be a part of that miracle. The power of prayer is great. I ask for your prayers on their behalf. Please pray for Braedon's healing and for strength and comfort for his family. He is only 20 months old. I am asking you to send this letter, or copies of it, to everybody you can think of that will pray for Braedon. Please also take his name to your church and church groups and ask others to pray for his healing. Many thanks and may God bless each one of you who cares enough to pray for a little boy's life. I am asking that each and every one of you please forward this on to everyone that you know. Please take time to do this right now. |
Comments by Peter Kohler: There was upon a time a handsome little boy named Brayden Banks Hembree (his name is misspelled in the missive above). He lay very sick in a hospital in Clinton, South Carolina. His family was powerfully worried about him and continually prayed for his well-being. As his condition worsened and became critical, one community member aware of this real-life drama taking place sent out an email prayer request for Brayden and the Hembree family. Some of those who received this message forwarded it; and some who received these forwards, themselves forwarded them.
The earliest extant example of this message that we have on file is dated 12 March 2000. As this thing really got under way, some of the folks who found it in their inboxes posted it on the Web at their favorite Christian prayer request site. We found over a hundred such sites with Brayden's name — misspelled — on them, many undated. It appears likely, due to the shifting formats of the email forwards, that some folks took these postings and copy-and-pasted them into more emails which began pinging through the internet faster than you could say ... well, Brayden Hembree.
What began as a quiet and sincere request, became an electronic roar. Which is all very fine and good. But then the moment came — and that moment may have been on 22 March 2000 when Brayden was released from the hospital, just over a month after being admitted — when that roar transmogrified into ... email spam!
And in this form it has continued for over a year, splatting and plopping into inboxes all over the place, puzzling no few individuals and causing them to ask: is it true? And causing no few others to further fling the stuff onward.
Awhile after our first posting about this matter, Brayden's mother wrote to us and kindly supplied us with this web address, http://pages.prodigy.net/denem/info.html, which tells the whole story of her son's ordeal.
We are truly very pleased that western medicine combined with loving prayers have returned this boy to full health. But the course of wisdom, if not mere internet savvy, suggests that one not forward emails before one has verified the facts (if there are any) in them. We can only hope that this one peters out at some point so that by the time Brayden Hembree is old enough to engage in email, he will not be forward an emergency prayer request for himself.
