Footprints (poem)

This popular text is based in Christian beliefs and describes an experience in which a person is walking on a beach with God.

In 2008, Rachel Aviv, in a Poetry Foundation article,[1] discusses the claims of Burrell Webb, Mary Stevenson, Margaret Fishback Powers, and Carolyn Joyce Carty.

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

[3] 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.

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.

"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.

May Riley Smith's poem "If," published without attribution in the Indianapolis Journal in 1869,[14][15] includes a stanza that describes God's footprints in the sand next to a boy's: If I could know those little feet were shod in sandals wrought of light in better lands, And that the foot-prints of a tender God ran side by side with his, in golden sands, I could bow cheerfully, and kiss the rod, since Benny was in wiser, safer hands.

[18] Aviv suggests that the source of the modern "Footprints" allegory is the opening paragraph of Charles Haddon Spurgeon's 1880 sermon "The Education of the Sons of God".

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.

In 1918, Mormon publication The Children's Friend re-published the Loughead piece (credited, but misspelled "Laughead"), ensuring a wider distribution in the western states.

[22] Chicago area poet Lucille Veneklasen frequently submitted poems to the Chicago Tribune in the 1940s and 1950s; one entitled "Footprints" was published in the Tribune in late 1958:[23] Veneklasen's poem appeared occasionally in newspaper obituaries, commonly lacking attribution, and often with the decease substituted for "I".

In 1963 and 1964, the Aiken Standard and Review in South Carolina ran a poem by frequent contributor M. L. Sullivan titled "Footprints".

The first to appear in July 1978, in a small Iowa town newspaper, is a very concise (six-sentence) version featuring an "elderly man" and "rocky roads".

An elderly man, who had lived his life and left this world to go and meet his Maker asked the Lord a question.

A third version appeared in October 1978, in two California papers, first in Oakland[27] and twelve days later in Shafter,[28] with a "young woman" and a "sandy pathway" in a "desert wilderness".

In January 1979, the Opelousas, Louisiana, Daily World published a near exact Carty version but with a "My dear child" mutation at the end, and no attribution.

[29] In March, the Winona Times presented a Powers-like version with "a certain elderly man ... walking along a sea shore" where "Out of the waves shot rays of light, mystic and wonderful that played across the sky illuminating scenes from his life".

"[30] The March 1979 issue of Liguorian, a monthly publication of the Catholic Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer, published a complete, nearly unmodified first-person version following Carty, but attributed to "Author Unknown".

The author of the local weekly column noted that it had been supplied by a friend who had "first heard [it] when Paul Harvey quoted it on his radio program.

A verbatim copy of the Havre instance ran in a small, inmate-produced newsletter published by the Napa State Hospital, in July 1979.

The column indicates that the correspondent who provided the work, claims to have carried a tattered copy around "for years" with no further explanation of its publication source.

During the 1980 United States presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan used a variant of "Footprints", with himself as the human, as the closing lines in an August speech to evangelical leaders in Dallas, Texas.

[41] In 1983, Cristy Lane released a country gospel song based on the poem called "Footprints in the Sand".

[42] Per Magnusson, David Kreuger, Richard Page, and Simon Cowell wrote a song based on the poem, called "Footprints in the Sand", which was recorded by Leona Lewis.

"Footprints in the Sand" became the official theme of the 2008 version of biennial charity programme Sport Relief, by the BBC.