Footprints in the Sand
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One night a man had a dream. He dreamed he was walking along the beach with the LORD. Across the sky flashed scenes from his life. For each scene he noticed two sets of footprints in the sand: one belonging to him, and the other to the LORD. When the last scene of his life flashed before him, he looked back at the footprints in the sand. He noticed that many times along the path of his life there was only one set of footprints. He also noticed that it happened at the very lowest and saddest times in his life. This really bothered him and he questioned the LORD about it: “LORD, you said that once I decided to follow you, you’d walk with me all the way. But I have noticed that during the most troublesome times in my life, there is only one set of footprints. I don’t understand why when I needed you most you would leave me.” The LORD replied: “My son, my precious child, I love you and I would never leave you. During your times of trial and suffering, when you see only one set of footprints, it was then that I carried you.” Author: Carolyn Joyce Carty |
That poem was one of my mother’s favorite poems. Before she passed away in 1984, she had a copy of this in her room. I am sure she probably thought that that poem really summed up her life. Because she went through those kinds of trials. In a way, the fact that she went through what she did and still loved God is to me a lesson in itself.
My Mom & Dad met each other sometime around 1950 in lower Alabama. She would have been about twenty, and he somewhere around twenty-eight. He was a veteran from WWII having seen action in both Africa and Italy, she was just a year or two out of Opp High School. This picture was taken while they were dating. Their favorite song was Red Sails in the Sunset by Nat King Cole. Sometime around the July 4th weekend of that year, they went to Gulfport, Mississippi and got married.
I have looked at this photo a lot over the years, and truly believe I see real love and happiness in their eyes. This was probably the only time they got to spend with each other as a couple. Because in May, 1951 big sister number one hit the ground running. The Korean Conflict was already in full swing and my Dad was quickly deployed there to serve in the fairly new at that time US Air Force (USAF).
June, 1952 brought big sister number two and I believe at this point they figured out what was causing these children to suddenly show up, because I didn’t arrive until August, 1955.
Of course, Mom may still have been mad at him for bringing her to the mountains of eastern Tennessee to winter over in late 1951. She always told us she had never been so cold in her life.
Dad was really good in electronics and did some outstanding work in Korea. He got noticed and was picked for some ‘very special’ training at MIT in Massachusetts. More training in upstate New York. While my Mom and sisters got to go to Massachusetts, they were left behind while he was in New York.
All that training Dad underwent started getting put to use in 1955. The atomic age was in full swing and nuclear weapons were being tested all over the place. In May, 1955 the Air Force kicked off Operation Teapot in the Nevada desert and Dad got to sit up front for his first fourteen nuclear detonations. During this time, he was in Nevada while Mom was at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. It seems that just as soon as it was over, the Air Force said let’s go out into the middle of the Pacific Ocean for Operation Redwing. Operation Redwing I believe is probably the one that got him. Beginning in May, 1956 while he was stationed at Enewetak Atoll, he again got to sit up front for seventeen more blasts. For some of these he was within ten miles of Ground Zero at the time of detonation. By the end of July that year he was finally heading home for a long spell.
It was in 1958 that he began to show signs of being sick. Just before sister number three arrived in 1959. After rapidly losing a lot of weight, he went to the USAF doctor who accused him of malingering. Not accepting that, he finally got someone to take him seriously. In 1960 he was sent to San Antonio, Texas for exploratory surgery. By this point the family had grown, now there were four children and the news he received in Texas was not good. It was cancer of the liver and pancreas. In May, 1963 he went to be with the Lord.
I told you all of that to tell you this.
Cindy and I have had over 37 years together, the good Lord willing we will have a whole bunch more. But Mom and Dad had to settle for an entire life lived inside of thirteen very short years. Thirteen years punctuated by several long and lonely separations.
Maybe the thought of those few short wonderful years of love is what kept her going. Maybe the appreciation for that blessing is what kept her in love with God.
That wasn’t the only trial she went through though.
After my Dad’s death, she was faced with trying to support and raise four children as a widow in south Alabama with nothing but a USAF pension check. She did it. It was not easy, we were definitely not the best children. (We weren’t the worst either but we certainly had our moments.)
The small town of Opp, Alabama was a gossip mill, and it worked overtime for my Mom. When my oldest sister got burned after her pajamas caught fire while standing in front of the space heater, she was silently accused of child neglect. Our next door neighbor was a married man and was a deacon of the church when he made a pass at her.
When I as a boy barely ten years old, I found a small child wandering lost in the neighborhood. I took her to the nearest adult I could think of, but the gossip mill accused me of being a ‘child molester’. (I did not find out about that until I was grown myself.)
Eventually she remarried.
I wish I could say that she lived happily ever after, but that was not the case. This marriage was short too. Only lasting about seventeen years it ended with her death, also from cancer but the type caused by too much alcohol and too many cigarettes. But I think it was caused by a lot of sadness too.
The only joy to come out of it was my youngest sister, probably one of the sweetest people I have ever met in this world.
In those last couple of years before she died, my Mom gave up the alcohol, but then lost her larynx to cancer. From then on we communicated in stilted conversations over the phone, or by written note when I would go to see her. I was in my late twenties and still quite full of myself, so I did not go often enough to see her. Nor did I have those long meaningful discussions that I would so love to have today.
It will be Mother’s day in just a couple of weeks. Maybe that is why I picked now to write about this.
But also because I have a copy of the same poem that she loved hanging in my home too. Every time I look at it, I read it and I think of her and how she continued to love God.
6 In all this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. 7 These have come so that the proven genuineness of your faith – of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire – may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed.
- 1 Peter 1:6-7 NIV