Footprints in the Sand

"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 a number of people claiming to have penned it. In 2008, Rachel Aviv in a Poetry Foundation article discusses the claims of Burrell Webb, Mary Stevenson, Margaret Fishback Powers and Carolyn Joyce Carty. Later that year, The Washington Post, covering a lawsuit between the claims of Stevenson, Powers and Carty, said that "At least a dozen people" had claimed credit for the poem.

The three authors who have most strenuously promoted their authorship are Margaret Powers (née Fishback), Carolyn Carty, and Mary Stevenson.

Canadian Margaret Fishback Powers says she wrote the poem on Canadian Thanksgiving weekend, in mid-October, 1964. Powers is among the contenders who have resorted to litigation in hopes of establishing a claim. (She is occasionally confused with similarly-named American writer Margaret Fishback.)

Carolyn Carty also claims to have written the poem in 1963, at 6 years old, based on an earlier work by her great-great aunt, a Sunday school teacher. She is known to be a hostile contender of the "Footprints" poem and declines to be interviewed for it to this day, although she commonly writes letters to those who write about the poem online.

Mary Stevenson is also a purported author of the poem circa 1936.

Powers published an autobiography in 1993

a Stevenson biography was published in 1995

and a collection of poetry by Carty with a claim to authorship of Footprints was published in 2004.

Prior to its appearance in the late 1970s as a key phrase in the poem, and its popular tile, the phrase "footprints in the sand" occurred in limited (but occasionally widely read) contexts, including prose, published work titles, and poetry.

The most dominant usage in prose is in the context of fictional or actual adventure or mystery stories or articles. Prominent fictional stories would include Daniel Defoe's 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe; and Nathaniel Hawthorne's Foot-prints on the Sea-shore, first published in the journal Democratic Review but republished in 1842 by Hawthorne in a collection of short stories titled Twice-Told Tales and reprinted many times since; a line in the story reads:

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