Sports have been part of my life ever since I was a little girl in Gloversville, New York. I was in the pool at the Y every chance I got. I begged my parents for a bike like the big kids, but I was five and had to start with training wheels. It was a great day when Daddy took those wheels off. “Here you go,” he said. He gave me a big push on my back. His hands were gentle, but strong.

I knew he believed I could do it. There I was, holding on, holding on, wobbling on my bike—and then I was riding steady all on my own!

That push was only the beginning for me. From then on I enjoyed testing my limits. I felt it when I dove into the pool, and when I rode my new 10-speed as fast as I could go. I did my best in school too, and graduated from college in Plattsburgh. But what was my challenge now? I wondered. I hoped my guardian angel would guide me.

I picked the University of South Florida in Tampa, earned a master’s degree in library science and got a job. At 23, my life seemed balanced. I found a welcoming church, and took advantage of all Florida had to offer outdoors. I was either in the water, or running or biking up and down the shore. Testing my limits. I felt my guardian angel behind me, just like Daddy had been all those years ago, ready to catch me if I wobbled or give me a push if I needed it.

Joining a running club introduced me to people who liked what I liked. That’s where I heard about triathlons, the competition that combines swimming, biking and running in consecutive order. The most famous is the Ironman—a 2.4-mile swim, 112-mile bike ride and 26.2-mile run. “Too much for me,” I said to a friend at the club one day.

“Why don’t you try a shorter race?” she said. “Start small.” Like with those training wheels! I thought. It was just the push I needed. I entered a sprint distance event: quarter-mile swim, 10-mile bike ride and three-mile run. With my friends cheering me on, the race was a breeze!

I did lots of biking, running and swimming over the next 20 years. My runner’s club became even more important to me. When my energy flagged, the guys were there to encourage me to keep going. We clocked a lot of time—and many more miles—together. My now-old bicycle and I participated in several short triathlons.

In 2002 a Half Ironman was announced for nearby Panama City. As the name implied, it was half the distance of the famous competition. A runner handed me a flyer. “Sign up, Claire,” she said. I was 46 years old. “You can do it,” she insisted.

Maybe if I train enough. Maybe if I put my mind to it. The problem with the Half Ironman was the cut-off times. You had to be out of the water, off the bike and finished with the whole race within certain time limits. I got really serious about my training. I started biking 25 to 60 miles, three days a week. I ran several miles three times a week, and swam every couple of days. More hours of training than I’d ever put in before. I had no time for anything else besides my job. Everything went by the wayside. Even church. I relied on my runner’s club when I needed a push.

Three of us from the club drove to Panama City on the night before the race. The starting gun would go off at 7 a.m. “I don’t know what I’d do without you girls,” I said before turning in.

The next morning hundreds of athletes lined up by the seashore. Young, old, men and women from everywhere. We started in waves, five minutes apart. My friends would be nowhere in sight once we started. “See you at the finish line!” we promised each other before we separated for the swimming race. When it was my turn I jumped in the water and completed the 1.2-mile swim within the time limit. It took longer than I expected, but I sighed with relief. One part of the race is over.

My bike was waiting for me at the starting line, put there by the race crew the night before. It seemed especially heavy after my swim. It was especially heavy, compared to some of the newer models. But I was determined.

“All 56 miles and no stopping,” I told myself. I’d make those cut-off times. The course wove through the city and then out into the country. People waved us on along the way. I was heady with excitement. The race! I was in the race!

After about 15 miles we rode up on an overpass, down the other side and then onto a long, straight road. Athletes passed me, but I was making progress. I glanced back and saw lots of people still behind me. I wished my friends were with me to encourage me on, but during a race you’re on your own. Keep it up, I told myself.

I followed the markers for the course, and finally we turned and headed back. We came to the overpass we’d crossed earlier. I went over it and down the other side. But this time it was harder to pedal. What’s wrong? I had no strength. I felt sick. My hands and feet were numb. I’m going to pass out. My bike seemed to weigh a thousand pounds. I stopped pedaling and coasted.

Athletes rode by me, and before long I was totally alone. I still had 15 miles to go, and then the 13-mile run. How could I make it? I can’t finish. All my effort. All my training. I’d tested my limits, and I’d lost. How I wished someone could give me the push I needed. But my friends were out of sight. The club, my training—what else did I have to rely on? It had been too long since I’d let my faith guide me. God, I thought shyly. Guardian angel? Are you still with me?

Seconds passed. I felt better. I was stunned. Had my prayer been answered so quickly? I pedaled faster. But I still needed strength. Out of nowhere I felt hands touch my back, pushing me, urging me on. The touch was gentle but strong. Just like my dad giving me a push on my bike so many years ago. He had believed in me then. God believed in me now! I will finish this race!

For the rest of the ride I thought of nothing else but the angel’s touch. I had new energy when I started the 13-mile run. It was extremely hot, but it didn’t slow me down. The course wound through the city and then out along the shore, past sea grass and sand dunes. We reached a beachfront park. People handed us oranges and ice water. Everyone cheered. I completed the race in seven hours and 45 minutes—well under the cut-off times for each event. Friends, training, guardian angels—that’s the winning trio for this triathlete.

It was our third day in Prague and already we’d visited six churches. My wife, Tib, has a boundless capacity for gilded domes and rococo statuary, but as I limped painfully up the steps to Our Lady of Victory I promised myself this was my last church here in the Czech Republic.

I’d plead the inevitable stair-climbing involved; a year after knee-replacement surgery steps were still agony.

“Early baroque,” Tib read from her guidebook, “the Barefoot Carmelite order has been in residence since 1618.” Blocking the stair landing, a group of schoolgirls in green blazers were listening to a pink-cheeked nun with a marvelous Irish brogue. “Hands carved by a mysterious sculptor,” the nun was saying.

This sounded more interesting than yet another date or the weight of gold leaf on another ceiling, but the green-clad group was standing aside to let us pass.

Stepping inside we were met by an all-enveloping hush, a kind of mutually held breath, quite unlike the atmosphere in the other churches. Always there’d been the hum of voices, the clatter of footsteps, the flash of cameras. Here, in spite of the hundred or more people walking or sitting or kneeling in the sanctuary, there was a quiet that went beyond silence.

What made this place different? At first glance it was much like the others, with its elaborate high altar and painted saints. About halfway down to our right was a side altar with a curved red-marble railing at which a dozen people knelt, while 20 others waited their turn. Curious, I walked down to see what was attracting such attention.

It was the usual florid shrine, all gilt and candles and frolicking cherubs. Inside a glass-and-silver case at the center was a small wax figure in a gold-embroidered purple robe and cape, on its head a tall gem-encrusted gold crown. Amid all this finery only the chubby face and plump hands of the figure itself were visible—clearly the features of a very young child.

Only a foot and a half high, to me it looked like a doll, very much in fact like a wax-faced doll of my grandmother’s.

Its gestures, though, were anything but doll-like. The tiny right hand was raised in formal blessing; the left held a golden globe of the world topped by a cross of diamonds.

And suddenly I knew why it all seemed oddly familiar. This must be the famous Infant of Prague, whose replica even such a reluctant tourist as I had seen in many churches in many countries. Jesus, age perhaps one-and-a-half, but robed and crowned as a splendid king.

I stood in that crowd at the altar rail, puzzled by the attraction this small figure exerted even on me. We were certainly a diverse group. The street woman with her plastic bag, the soldier—German?—in uniform, the woman with the worn face, the man with the briefcase and silently moving lips. Ring binders lining the railing provided prayers in nine languages.

Different circumstances, different nations, yet each with some quality in common. Need, I thought, for money, or relationship or healing—like me with the stubborn pain in my knee.

Still, intrigued as I was, I’m not especially into dolls. With a whispered goodbye to Tib I made my way back across the Karluv Most, the 650-year-old bridge that connects the church’s neighborhood of Mala Strana to Old Town, near our hotel on the other side of the Vltava.

But I couldn’t get the little Infant out of my mind. Could those tiny hands be the ones the nun was talking about? Was there some mystery about the statue? I spent the evening studying the abundant literature Tib, as always, had brought back from the church.

No one knows when the Infant was carved. What is known is that it was brought from Spain in 1555 by a princess coming to Prague for an arranged marriage to a man she’d never met. Alone in this strange, cold country she found comfort in the little wax figure from her family chapel.

It was this princess’s daughter, Lady Polyxena of Lobkowitz, who in 1628 gave the sculpture to the Carmelites for their new church.

Just three years later Prague was invaded by Saxon troops in one of the most bloody combats of the Thirty Years War. The Carmelites were no match for sword and blunderbuss, and they fled. The occupying army seized everything of value and then destroyed what was left. For roughly six years the church was used as a warehouse.

When the monks returned they searched the despoiled sanctuary for the little statue. It had vanished, taken with the other loot, most likely, for its costly ornaments.

Some time later a monk named Cyril was sweeping the dusty floor behind the altar when he spotted something wedged into a corner. It was the little wax figure, stripped of its jewels. Father Cyril blew away a cloud of chalky grime and bit his lip—both of the little hands were missing.

Cyril pleaded with his superiors to hire a sculptor to repair the damaged statue. But money was scarce, and with both monastery and church left in ruins images were not a top priority. The maimed Infant was placed in an oratory inside the walls where only the Carmelites could enter.

Soon word got around that when the monks prayed there, focusing their attention on Jesus as a tiny child, their prayers were often answered in remarkable ways. Cyril hoped all the more that the Infant could get back its hands and be returned to the church, accessible to all.

One day Father Cyril was told there was someone wanting to speak to him in the church. There he found a lady kneeling in prayer at the altar. She rose to hand him a leather pouch. “The grace of God has sent you this gift to ease your heart’s desire,” she said. He opened it and saw a large sum of money.

When he looked up, the lady had disappeared. It was enough to hire the top sculptor in the city, “because work for God must be the finest there is.” But the new hands, when the fee was paid and the sculpture returned, were too big, glaringly out of proportion to the small figure.

Another sculptor was hired, but his work, when finished, could not be made to stay attached to the fragile wax arms. Yet a third tried, for a price, to carve new hands; these too fell off.

Then one day a young man came to the monastery. He’d heard about the Infant’s missing hands and wanted to repair them. The stranger offered no credentials, but running low on money the monks had no choice but to let this unknown sculptor try where experts had failed. They found a corner where the young man could work and left him alone.

The next morning when they went into the makeshift workroom they were astonished to find the statue upright on a pedestal, wax hands exquisitely fashioned and so perfectly joined to the statue that it was impossible to see where the new work began.

The monks scurried around looking for the young sculptor so they could pay him for his fine work. They searched the monastery, the church, the neighborhood. No one in the city knew where the sculptor came from or where he went. “He must be an angel,” the citizens whispered among themselves. The statue was moved back to the main sanctuary, and in time the monks were able to build a side altar to display it.

So this was the mysterious sculptor the nun had been talking about. But surely, I thought, it can’t be the little wax figure itself, no matter how curious its history, that for more than 350 years has brought pilgrims streaming to this place.

The next morning I crossed the Karluv Most with its street musicians, souvenir sellers and throngs of tourists to stand again in the back of the Carmelite church. As far down the aisle as I could see, the pew-backs were scarred with cigarette burns, perhaps a reminder of 44 years of Communist rule when churches were used as a place to house troops.

The sanctuary was as full, and as hushed, as before, the same variety of people clustered at the side altar. In the literature Tib brought back to the hotel the sculptor was again referred to as an angel. What was so important about this particular statue that even angels in heaven wanted it returned to public view?

Looking around that morning I thought I had a hint. Many of us in the church, perhaps all of us, had some circumstance we were powerless to change. Nothing I’d tried changed the fact of a painful and limiting knee.

A one-year-old child has no power either, yet this Infant was robed in victory! Perhaps that was its appeal. Look again, the angels want to say. God’s view of your situation is right in front of you.

Powerlessness is the perfect place to be—because it throws you totally into the arms of God. When you surrender your weakness to him, he turns it into a victory. Not always the victory you would have chosen, but always one that shows you a new dimension of his love.