Footprints in the Sand

 

Footprints in the sand.

My usual walk after visiting Mom each day in CA was along Redondo Beach. There is a paved pedestrian path, parallel to the paved path for everything with wheels, from bikes and e-bikes to scooters, skates, skateboards, and some little motorised balls controlled, I think, by balance.

Often, I would leave the paved path and approach the shore. There is more of a workout walking in the dry sand, but once along the wet shore the walking eases again. There is something so therapeutic in gazing at the waves, washing in, pulling back, washing in, pulling back: watching the sea birds and occasional dolphins: hearing the music of children’s laughter.

On the paved path, the walking was easy and I left no footprints. In the sand, both dry and wet, impressions of my heels and toes formed as I passed through. There they would have lingered until other feet, or incoming tides, erased them.

Mom embroidered the words from the famous Footprints poem for me years ago, and it hangs in the living room. ‘Why,’ the poet asks Jesus, ‘Why, at the difficult times in my life, when I needed you most, did you leave me?’ Jesus replies, ‘I never left you, my precious child. Where you see only one set of footprints: it was then that I carried you.’

I woke up this morning feeling like a rag doll, flopped onto the back of my Saviour. A major disappointment in the longed-for purchase of an apartment, changes in the ownership and management of Mom’s residential facility creating uncertainty, more banking issues for her, and an email from the car rental company saying they’d concluded that the damage done on the rental car, which had been noted on the pink slip when I picked the car up, had been attributed to me: sometimes it’s pretty clear that the only way forward is on the back of my Saviour.