Footsteps on Beach

October of 2004

I stepped onto the beach in Florence, Oregon.  Late afternoon was turning into early evening.  The dark water of the Pacific surged against the sand.  Gulls cried from the sky above.

I wasn't quite sure why I was there.  Two hours ago, I'd found out that my fiance had left me.  Our final fight had been about faith.  She'd spent almost a year trying to convert me from Catholicism to Evangelical Christianity.  Yesterday, I told her that I just couldn't do it.  I respected her faith, but I couldn't believe in it the same way that I did Catholicism. 

Today she was gone.  I looked around the empty condo and then got in the car.  She was going North away from Eugene.  I went West.  The road stopped in Florence and so did I.


I took off my shoes and socks to walk barefoot.  The sand was cool. I focused on the feel of the sand against my toes and the sound of the rushing waves.  I tried not to think about the painful irony that building into a full crisis of faith.  I believed God is love.  1 John 4:8.  She also believed God is love.  But our differences in approaching that divine love had torn ours apart.  How could that be God's plan? 

The wind whipped my face.  I tried not to think that she was probably on her way out of Portland and heading East down the Columbia River.  Eventually she'd cross into Washington, then to Idaho, and back to Montana.  She's pull onto the same street that I used to walk her down after school and stop at her mother's house. 

What would she do if I called her up and told her I'd become anything she wanted me to be: Born Again, Jehovah's Witness, or even a snappy dresser.  If God is love, wouldn't that somehow be right?

I noticed a set of footprints to my left closer towards the water.  It was the only set of footprints on the beach, excluding the ones trailing behind me.  I remembered a prayer that I began using in the spring of 2002.  I'd envision Jesus on a beach walking in front of me.  His footsteps were laid out and all that I had to do was walk in them.  As I moved through the prayer, my anxieties and stresses fell away as I settled into His footsteps - giving up my worries and trusting in the way.  In those footsteps I knew that I didn't have to understand the plan in order to get where I was supposed to go.

As I daydreamed, the stranger's footprints to my left began to drift right until they were just a few feet away from me.  I continued forward and began to realize how similar my natural stride was to the distance between the stranger's steps.  In fact, there didn't appear to be that much difference in the size of our feet either.

I remembered the prayer and smiled.  I sheepishly looked around, saw no one, then took a long step with my left foot and dropped it onto one of the footprints.  I put my right foot into the print before me and then stepped again with my left.  It was a clumsy game.  It seemed that the more I focused on getting the stride perfect, the worse I got.

I quit playing and continued to walk.  My mind move back toward theological doubts.  Then on accident, I stepped directly into one of the footprints.  My foot settled in perfectly.  It all matched: length, width, and shape.  Eery. 

Without thinking, I stepped forward with my other foot and landed in the the corresponding footpring.  Again, it fit.  I wasn't playing anymore.  I tried to calm my mind and simply let myself walk.  Each step fit perfectly into the footprints laid out before me.  The footprint and stride were both identical.

I tried not to think of the chances that those prints had been made of by someone my exact height and footsize.  They even seemed to gimp a little bit on the left leg like I do.  A statistician might have been able to come up with a rational explanation, but I'm not a statistician.

I walked for two miles in those footprints.  The waves slid onto the sand and the sky began to darken, but still each stride fit like I was stepping into my own footprint.

Somewhere in that journey, I decided that I didn't have to wrap my mind around the religious implications of my fiance's departure.  For better or worse, she was gone.  There was nothing I could do about it, but somehow the stranger's footprints in front of me had convinced me that it was okay. 

I was on the path that I was meant to be on and really in the end that's all we can hope for.


I developed this prayer after the experience.  It's still the foundation of my daily prayer life.

Jesus, please grant me the wisdom to see the path that you want me to take and the courage, discipline, and grace to take it.