"Footprints," also known as "Footprints in the Sand," is a popular allegorical Christian poem. It describes a person who sees two pairs of footprints in the sand, one of which belonged to God and another to themselves. At some points the two pairs of footprints dwindle to one; it is explained that this is where God carried the protagonist.
Content
This popular text is based in Christian beliefs and describes an experience in which a person is walking on a beach with God. They leave two sets of footprints in the sand. The tracks represent stages of the speaker's life. The two trails dwindle to one, especially at the lowest and most hopeless moments of the person's life. When the narrator questions 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."
Authorship and origin
The authorship of the poem is disputed, with a number of people claiming to have written 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. 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 American writer Margaret Fishback. Powers published an autobiography in 1993.
Carolyn Carty also claims to have written the poem in 1963 when she was six 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 about it, although she writes letters to those who write about the poem online. A collection of poetry by Carty with a claim to authorship of "Footprints" was published in 2004.
Mary Stevenson is also a purported author of the poem circa 1936. A Stevenson biography was published in 1995.
Popular use of phrase
Before its appearance in the 1970s, the phrase "footprints in the sand" occurred in other works. The most dominant usage in prose is in the context of fictional or nonfiction adventure or mystery stories or articles. Prominent fiction includes Daniel Defoe's 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe and Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story Foot-prints on the Sea-shore published in the Democratic Review. Hawthorne published the story again in Twice-Told Tales and it has been reprinted many times since. A line in the story reads, "Thus, by tracking our foot-prints in the sand, we track our own nature in its wayward course, and steal a glance upon it, when it never dreams of being so observed. Such glances always make us wiser." Non-fiction includes the 1926 post-kidnapping discovery of Aimee Semple McPherson in the northern Mexican desert.
In the two centuries before 1980, when "Footprints" entered popular American culture, many books, articles, and sermons appeared with "Footprints in the Sand" as a title. Some of them concerned the lives of Christian missionaries. Footprints and Living Songs is an 1883 biography of hymn-writer Frances Ridley Havergal. In 1839, "A Psalm of Life" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow contained the lines:
Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime, And, departing, leave behind us Footprints on the sands of time.
Within a decade, the last phrase of the poem was being used in public discourse without attribution, apparently on the assumption that any literate reader would know its origin. In some usages "of time" disappeared; later, "on" seems to become "in". "The Object of a Life" (1876) by George Whyte-Melville includes the lines:
To tell of the great example, the Man of compassion and woe; Of footprints left behind Him, in the earthly path He trod, And how the lowest may find Him, who straitly walk with God
was published in the widely read (and plagiarized) Temple Bar. The lines here are strikingly similar in many respects to those seen in contemporaneous hymn lyrics and later poetry.