Vachon Imagined

When God becomes a crutch, people sometimes use its name to avoid doing what is right, or what is difficult. They say things like, God will heal us, or I will be praying for you, and while prayer in its purest form is life itself—an inward alignment that can lead to clarity, courage, and right action—it can also become a kind of scaffolding placed around what is already known, already demanded, already given.

A woman asks for respect and kindness from her husband, and instead of responding directly, he says he will “pray on it.” In that moment, prayer is no longer movement toward truth—it becomes delay. It becomes distance. It becomes a way of avoiding the immediate, human responsibility of care.

God is then invoked not as a call into deeper action, but as a buffer against it. A substitute for the very thing that is being avoided. What should have been kindness becomes deferral. What should have been presence becomes abstraction. And what should have been transformation becomes repetition.

And yet, it is not always so simple.

Sometimes “I will pray for you” is not escape, but the only language someone has for holding what they do not know how to hold. Sometimes prayer is what prevents collapse into cruelty, reactivity, or silence. But even then, it must eventually become something more than containment. It must move. It must become gesture, repair, accountability, change.

Because otherwise, prayer risks becoming a closed loop—an endless return to intention without consequence. A space where sincerity exists, but never crosses into embodiment.

What is avoided is rarely just action. It is vulnerability. To act is to change, and to change is to risk the death of a former self—the self that believed it was already good, already right, already safe.

And for many, that threshold feels like death itself.

But what is called transcendence is often simply this: the willingness to step beyond language into consequence, beyond belief into behavior, beyond the idea of goodness into its enactment.

Not prayer instead of action—but prayer fulfilled through it.