A prayer from the skatepark

Emily Benson, staff writer for The Evangelist.

I always wanted to learn how to ride a skateboard as a kid. I had visions of me soaring down the sidewalk in the summer, doing kickflips and showing off my wild and rebellious talent to my friends. 

The problem — I so quickly learned — was that skateboarding is not all that easy. The first time I ever stepped on a board I was shocked at how seamlessly it moved. How did Tony Hawk make it look so easy? I went to do my first push forward but instead shot backward, watching my hopes (and skateboard) sail down the driveway. 

Of course my dad (who paid for my four-wheeled blading dream) insisted I keep trying. And sure enough I improved slightly, but I needed faster results. If I wanted to be riding guardrails by August, I had to ramp up my training. 

So I prayed. And this is not to knock the power of prayer here, but that was all I did. I turned to God and said, “Please make me the Michael Jordan of skating,” before I skipped practice altogether to go play video games. 

Shockingly enough, I went out the next day only to find that I was in fact worse than before. So much for my leap of faith, I thought.

To me, the concept of prayer always meant that anything was possible. If God could perform miracles, surely he could make me a better skater without all the tedious work. And while I’ve long since forgotten my boarding dream, the question it raised for me always stuck: How much do end results rely on our work ethic when there’s always a chance that God could pull us through in the end? 

Of course, this applies in a more meaningful context than just the skatepark. When we pray for a job we really want or to ace a final exam; when we ask for help with overdue bills or for issues with a spouse to heal, can we skip out on putting in the work and still get what we desire? If it truly is meant to be, could God get us there, efforts made or not?

Father Samuel Bellafiore, parochial vicar of the Church of the Holy Trinity in Cohoes, offered a word of advice to my plight, noting these questions “come up a lot in the parts of the Christian intellectual tradition that deal with virtues, because a typical natural virtue is something you acquire through repeated practice.”

“People talk about acquired virtue and infused virtue,” Father Sam said. “Acquired, I have to work on it, and God works through my human nature. He might send me people who can help me, and he makes it possible for me to work on what I’m working on. And sometimes we need the extra help, and that’s when he can infuse the help.”

The first time I heard this it just felt like I drew the short end of the stick. Because if God could have infused change (and made my skateboarding dreams a reality) it’s frustrating to think he didn’t. 

But the more I sat with this the more I came around to it: if God’s hand wasn’t at play in those moments I called for him, did that mean I was capable of cultivating this change myself? Maybe direct assistance from the divine isn’t always the answer because the help we need is already at our disposal. 

“There is that combination in life when God sort of trusts us with something and is like here, work on this,” Father Sam said. God says, “I’m here, I’m gonna help you, I’ll catch you if you fall,” but there is a difference between “I’m here to help you” and I’ll do it for you. 

“And there are times when you pray for something that you want and it doesn’t always happen the way you want, and that doesn’t mean God’s unfaithful to your prayer or doesn’t hear you,” he added. “It’s because he’s given us our freedom and he needs us to exercise it.”

But not all actions can be explained, he added. If we pray for help in a dark time and nothing changes, that doesn’t mean the pain we feel is some life lesson in disguise: sometimes bad things just happen, and it hurts to feel like nobody listened.

“There are things that are senseless,” Father Sam said. “The promise we’re given is that in the end God is victorious over everything, but things happen that God never wanted to happen. I say this a lot at funerals, we sense it’s not supposed to be this way and that is correct. This is not how God created the world.”

I think it will take some unlearning to not see God as being around to constantly intervene. It’s nicer to think of him as one of those hands in a toy claw machine, dropping in now and then to move his stuffed animals around. But why would God do everything for us when life and all its lessons are here for us to experience? And while I don’t think I’ll ever find an answer satisfactory enough to quench the question of, “Why do bad things happen?” at least we won’t be alone in trying to answer it.

My younger self might be grumpy to have never been zapped with the power of skateboarding, but maybe I wasn’t supposed to be. I have my health and a new indoor skatepark downtown, so maybe I’ll invest in a good helmet and some knee­pads (maybe life insurance) and get back to boarding, praying and practicing at the same time.