If you are doing a show about making wishes come true, it doesn't hurt to have a host named Grant.

That's hardly the reason the producers of "Three Wishes," NBC's new Friday feel-good hit, say they had only one name on their own wish list: singer Amy Grant.

"People ask me all the time how we came to choose Amy," executive producer Andrew Glassman says, "and I have to say that I feel she was such an obvious choice. Everything that she has stood for in her career, in her music and in her public persona, captured everything that I wanted the show to be about: the warmth, the passion, the understanding.

"When I called her, I fully expected her to say, 'No, I can't' or 'I don't like reality TV,' but she really responded to the idea of our show, and I'm really grateful for that. We never really considered anyone else to host the show."

While Glassman may not have known it at the time, Grant says some of her associates already had brought the project to her attention. The singer's schedule was already crowded with concerts and a desire to spend quality time at home with husband Vince Gill and their children, but Grant says the concept of "Three Wishes" sounded almost too good to be true.

"A chance to create an environment where you could talk to people and find out what they needed, then to use network sponsorship dollars to help meet those needs? I thought: Somebody pinch me!" Grant recalls. "It's like if you had unlimited funds and the ability to write out a life mission statement, wouldn't it be to find people, have meaningful interaction and accomplish things that are important?

"My only hesitation was, although I have not seen a lot of reality television, it has a reputation for being very, very exploitative. The producers of our show have a lot of integrity, though, and I am very proud and happy to be here."

Each episode of the show calls upon Grant and her co-stars -- Carter Oosterhouse ("Trading Spaces"), Diane Mizota ("Trading Spaces: Boys vs. Girls") and Eric Stromer ("Clean Sweep") to visit a small American community and meet with local residents to identify three key wishes the team will work together to grant. Those wishes run from the relatively straightforward (helping to cut through bureaucratic red tape in an adoption case) to the slightly surreal (re-creating a high-school prom for a woman who missed the original event several years ago because of an accident).

After pitching the "wish tent" in each town, Grant listens to far more wishes than the team can grant, although the show often dispenses help beyond the three significant wishes that form the basis of each episode. Yet even for people who may not see their own wishes granted, just the act of a community joining together in a spirit of caring and giving to others can be a transforming event, she says.

"The atmosphere in the wish tent involves a certain amount of vulnerability and people knowing they're being heard," Grant explains. "I think good things happen just to say what it is that's important to you. For a grandson to show up and say, 'My grandma is 90 years old, and she's always wanted to fly in a hot-air balloon,' something significant happens just because he stood in line."

Grant may be a five-time Grammy Award winner, but her strong grass-roots appeal makes it easy for strangers to let down their guard and share deeply personal stories with her.

"Usually when I'm with people, it's almost as if I am listening too hard to cry," Grant says of her on-camera demeanor. "I don't want to miss anything, to be distracted by having to blow my nose. Maybe it has something to do with having sung songs at some very sad occasions, but you're just always so much more aware of the other person's experience. It just naturally puts your own tear ducts on hold."

Every now and then, however, Grant says she encounters a human story of such raw emotional impact that she cannot keep her composure, as in a recent visit with a woman whose husband was dying of a brain tumor. Once strikingly handsome and active, this father of five now is a pale shadow of his former self.

"She had shown me pictures of the man she had married, and I asked her, 'What is it like loving someone at this point in life?' " Grant says. "She said, 'As painful as this is, Bill is more the man he was meant to be, is becoming the essence of who he is because everything else is taken away from him. He is more alive to us now because his character is showing through.'

"I just held my hand up to the camera and said, 'I can't take this,' and just threw my arms around her, and she and I just wept. I think I may actually have yelled, 'Turn off the camera!' "

The heavy demands on Grant's time mean that she and her family have to schedule things carefully, and she stays in touch with friends and loved ones by phone as she's waiting at airports or grabs another spare moment.

When she does get home, she sees her family through a new, more meaninful perspective she credits to the people she has met on "Three Wishes."

"My own wish would be for the power to be in two places at one time, so I could spend more time with my family," she says, "but I know that's not possible.

"To be invited into these powerful situations is life-changing. I go home from every work trip more aware of the beauty of my children, of who they are going to be in life, of what an impact they could have on the world if they don't underestimate the value of caring for other people. And I look at my husband and realize, 'If we both live to be 100, it still won't be enough time to really know each other.'

"I don't know what I expected to happen on this show, but the lessons we are learning as we help these people have just surpassed anything I could have imagined."