Footprints (poem)

"Footprints", also known as "Footprints in the Sand", is a popular allegorical text written in prose.

This popular text describes an experience in which a person is walking on a beach with God. They leave two sets of footprints in the sand behind them. Looking back, the tracks represent various stages of the speaker's life. At various points, the two trails dwindle to one, especially at the lowest and most hopeless moments of the person's life. When questioning God, believing that the Lord must have abandoned his love during those times, God gives the explanation: "During your times of trial and suffering, when you see only one set of footprints, it was then that I carried you."

The original authorship of the poem is disputed, with dozens of people claiming to have penned it. Rachel Aviv in a Poetry Foundation article discusses the various claims and suggests that the source of this poem is the opening paragraph of Charles Haddon Spurgeon's 1880 sermon "The Education of the Sons of God".

He wrote:

And did you ever walk out upon that lonely desert island upon which you were wrecked, and say, “I am alone, — alone, — alone, — nobody was ever here before me”? And did you suddenly pull up short as you noticed, in the sand, the footprints of a man? I remember right well passing through that experience; and when I looked, lo! it was not merely the footprints of a man that I saw, but I thought I knew whose feet had left those imprints; they were the marks of One who had been crucified, for there was the print of the nails. So I thought to myself, “If he has been here, it is a desert island no longer.

June Hadden Hobbs suggested that its origins lie in Mary B. C. Slade's 1871 hymn "Footsteps of Jesus" as "almost surely the source of the notion that Jesus's footprints have narrative significance that influences the way believers conduct their life stories .... it allows Jesus and a believer to inhabit the same space at the same time. [...] Jesus travels the path of the believer, instead of the other way round".

Margaret Fishback (Antolini), whose light verse appeared regularly in popular American magazines from the 1930s to the 1960s, had no connection to "Footprints," although her name confusingly resembles that of one claimed author, Canadian Margaret Fishback Powers. Powers is among the contenders who have resorted to litigation in hopes of establishing a claim.

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Wikipedia