Footprints in the Sand - Part I

During these months dealing with my TBI, I’m learning lowly, stubbornly, and sometimes tearfully that discipleship isn’t measured by efficiency. This week, the poem Footprints in the Sand keeps finding me again. Not as a cliché, but as a quiet mirror of what my life is. The poem dares to say what I often don’t want to admit: the moments that felt most abandoned and alone may have been the moments I was most carried. It also brings back a theme that I have ruminated on since seeing the good, bad, and the ugly side of the church for the last 20 years. If we are supposed to love like Jesus, why do we cause so much destruction, pain, and hurt? Why do we cause so many to reject the Gospel and choose to live without the Church and Jesus?

                                

During this season, I’ve learned what it means to move carefully, to measure distance differently, to take the next step with attention instead of ambition. At times, I feel like walking in a dream, but in this state, I feel the presence of Jesus holding my hand with much love and care. Like the poem, at times over the last months, scenes from my life begin to come back to me. A while back I realized that in a broken medical system, I have to be my own psychologist, neurologist, and physician to heal what is broken inside of me. The flashback of memories feel like a reel of moments I didn’t ask to rewatch. Some were bright and steady, some blurred and heavy, some so tender they hurt and brought tears to my life. As I reflect on my life, I could almost see the shape of my prayers: sometimes confident and loud, sometimes whispered and repetitive, sometimes nothing more than, “Lord, help.” It was the strange mercy of memory—realizing that even the days that felt like I was nothing were still days God counted as part of my story. 

What has grabbed my heart, and wouldn’t let go is was how often there are two or sometimes three sets of footprints, and then suddenly, only one. I recognized that pattern immediately, because it’s the pattern of my body right now too: some days I can track a conversation, and other days the words come like water through my fingers. Some days my balance is manageable, and other days it’s like the ground is a moving boat and I’m bracing myself just to look normal. Some days my eyes cooperate, and other days everything strains—blur, fatigue, the cost of focusing. I could see it: the hardest scenes were the ones with the fewest footprints. 

Reliving the dark moments of my life is where faith stops being poetic and becomes a question that feels almost dangerous to ask. During the low periods, filled with anguish, sorrow, and defeat, the picture looks thinner. Right now, I am living those periods, even when I’m smiling at church or replying “I’m okay” to someone who means well. There are defeats nobody claps for: the day I can’t follow a group conversation, the day my balance is so off I feel embarrassed in my own body, the day my eyes are too tired to do what used to be effortless. In those moments, it’s easy to believe the lie that suffering means absence. 

I can confess to my Lord and saviour, I’ve tried to soften in my waking life and my heart. The lines above are not a polished prayer. It is a cracked one. The kind that comes from someone who is still choosing to follow, but is tired of pretending this valley or the pain they have experienced from those in church leadership doesn’t hurt. Sometimes the set of two footprints, don't just signify the Lord. They represent those who carry us or hold us through the storms of life, such as our siblings in Christ or our partners in covenant love. 

Carrying doesn’t always feel like flying, either when one needs to be carried, or does the carrying. Many of us don’t know how to carry others when they need to be carried. We are not trained to do that; it is something we need to ask the Lord for to teach us to do. At times carrying feels like surviving, like just having enough grace for the next hour. At times one may feel steadiness one can’t explain, like the quiet strength to keep showing up. There are times where we make feel God holding us so close, we can’t even tell where his strength ends and yours begins, because ours ran out, and his didn’t.  

As I wake from that “Footprints” kind of comfort, a hymn starts singing itself in the background of my week. The voice is the one of my beloved Pastor in Nova Scotia: Reverend Sherrolyn Riley. I know who holds tomorrow, and I know who holds my hand. Right now, I’m learning that God’s hand often feels like hands, plural. It is hard for me to admit to my Pastor friends and colleagues who serve in Medicine and Ministry that I am broken— body, heart, soul— and need help. I need prayers whispered for me when I don’t have words. I need the comfort of friends who sit with me in person when noise and conversation feel like too much. I need those people who check in gently, who don’t rush me, who walk at my pace, who aren’t offended when I’m quiet or slow to respond. Many of you already do that for me, and I’m deeply grateful for every one of those “hands". They are not just kindness, they are evidence of years of dedicated service to working and learning to love those at the margins of society. Evidence that now I am at a time where I need to be carried as a patient and as a congregant, that I need pastoring, TLC, and medicine to heal me so I can return to preaching and reaching. 

I need to confess something tender: I’m not always able to use my gift of reaching out right now. This is partly due to my TBI, and also the fact that the Lord is refining and helping me reflect on the past years. The gift of being an encourager is one that I have been given and will be used in the future. Right now, I can't be the good Samaritan or physician reaching out and noticing others, the one who carries. These are the days where I’m the one who needs to be carried, and that is humbling and even painful.