The image of footprints in the sand is familiar to many people. Two sets of footprints run side by side, together telling the story of a life. Until, along certain stretches, only one set remains visible. Precisely during the most difficult moments, when grief and uncertainty dominated life, one trail seems to have disappeared. The conclusion seems obvious: that was where someone walked alone. The answer in Footprints in the Sand turns that thought around. That was precisely where the person was being carried.

It is an image that stays with me, because it says something about how different a life can look when we are living in the middle of it and when we look back on it later.

Footprints is not a biblical text. It is a modern text expressing an idea that is much older. Throughout the Bible, the image of being carried appears in several places. At times it is a promise concerning a road that still lies ahead; elsewhere it is a conclusion reached when looking back on a road already travelled.

In Isaiah, we find a beautiful promise. Even when old age has come and our hair has turned grey, God promises that He remains the same. He created us, He will carry us, sustain us and rescue us.

I will carry you.

Elsewhere in the Bible, the perspective is reversed and the journey is viewed in retrospect. In Deuteronomy, the journey through the wilderness is remembered, and God is described as having carried His people throughout that journey as a father carries his son. Isaiah, too, contains this retrospective image: in their distress, people were lifted up and carried.

I have carried you.

Between those two sentences lies an entire world.

Between I will carry you and I have carried you lies life itself. That is where we find the days when we have no idea how a story will end. It is where the nights lie in which sleep hardly comes, the hours when thoughts race in every direction, and the moments when emotions change so quickly that it becomes almost impossible to understand what is happening inside us.

As I reflected on those words, I knew that I did not want to write this blog only for myself. This time, I am writing for someone in particular. Someone who is going through a period in which life is heavy and the road ahead is barely visible.

Who that person is does not matter for this story. Nor does what is happening need to be given a place here. Some stories belong to the person who is living them and deserve the protection of silence.

Still, I would like to give that person something I cannot give myself. I cannot make the road shorter. I cannot take away grief, and I cannot bring peace to nights in which thoughts refuse to become quiet. What I can do is write these words and hope that somewhere between these lines, something can be found to hold on to.

That is why this blog is for you.

Looking back has a certain clarity to it. We already know what came next. We know that morning eventually arrived, that we got up, and that after that one day another day followed. In the middle of such a period, that perspective does not exist. A single night can seem endless, and the thought of next week can already feel impossibly far away.

That is precisely why I find the image of being carried so meaningful.

We often associate strength with someone who remains standing. Someone who keeps going, makes decisions, picks up the thread and slowly begins to find direction again. That is a visible form of strength. There is another, much quieter form as well. The strength of someone who can only manage today today. Of someone who gets up again after an almost sleepless night. Of someone who, for a moment, thinks they know how to move forward, only to be overwhelmed by grief again a short while later.

From the outside, that may look like staggering from one place to another. From the inside, it may simply be survival.

A person does not need to know every day where they are going. Not every emotion needs to be understood immediately, and not every question needs an answer today. Grief rarely follows the straight lines we later like to recognise in it. It moves forwards and backwards, can disappear for a while and return without warning. A memory, a song, an empty place or a thought can be enough to bring back everything that seemed to have moved into the background for a moment.

That does not make someone weak.

It tells us that something mattered.

We would like to help one another through periods like these. We would like to make grief smaller, provide answers and convince the other person that a day really will come when things feel different. Yet people cannot always take one another to the place the other ultimately needs to reach. Even the most loving words cannot sleep a sleepless night for someone else. No one can take over another person’s grief, and no one can make time move faster on another person’s behalf.

There is a certain powerlessness in that.

When we see someone struggling, we often want to do something. To reach out a hand, solve things, soften the pain, protect them. Yet being close to someone can also mean acknowledging that we are not the person who can provide the answer. That we have to trust that a human being can be carried by something greater than our own arms.

That is where this ancient promise takes on meaning for me.

I will carry you.

The promise does not say that you will never fall. Nor does it say that you will never know grief, that every night will be peaceful or that every morning will begin with clarity. These words are about a human being who apparently needs to be carried. They are about vulnerability, dependence and periods in which our own strength feels insufficient.

And that brings Footprints back into the story.

The person in the poem looks back on the path of his life and initially thinks he sees evidence of abandonment. Along the hardest stretches, after all, there is only one set of footprints. Only later does his perspective change. The absence of his own footprints turns out not to be evidence that he was alone. It tells him that along that part of the journey, he did not have to walk himself.

What touches me is that, while he was travelling that road, he apparently did not know.

He understood only afterwards.

That means being carried does not always feel like being carried.

You can feel alone without being alone. You can think you are falling while something is holding you. You can experience no sense of progress at all and discover later that you did move forward. You can wake up one morning with no idea how you are supposed to make it through another entire day, only to realise months or years later that this day, too, became part of the road behind you.

During the darkest stretches of our lives, we rarely know what the landscape looks like further ahead. That is why we do not need to be there yet.

Today is allowed to be today. A night is allowed to be a night, and grief is allowed to be grief. If walking is impossible today, that does not mean the journey has stopped.

For me, that is ultimately the connection between those ancient biblical words and the modern poem about footprints in the sand. On one side of the road, the Bible gives us a promise; on the other, it looks back and offers a conclusion.

I will carry you.

I have carried you.

Between them, a human being lives a life.

Along many stretches, two sets of footprints will be visible. We walk, choose, grow, stumble, get up again and find our way. Along other stretches, we may later see only one trail.

Those stretches do not have to be the places we are ashamed of or the places where we call ourselves weak. They may simply be the parts where our own feet could no longer do what we were asking of them.

And anyone who is standing in the middle of such a part of their journey today does not yet need to be able to look back. Nor do they need to understand today why the road is taking the course it is taking. That requires distance, and distance can only be created by time.

That is why, for the person for whom I am writing these words, my greatest hope is that today does not need to be anything more than today. That no answers need to be found before they reveal themselves, and that no strength needs to be proven when that strength simply is not there right now.

I cannot know where your road will lead from here.

I do hope that one day you will be able to look back and discover that, precisely along the stretch where you thought you could barely continue, footprints were still left behind in the sand.

And if there is only one set, I hope that by then you will know why.

At the beginning of that road, there was the promise:

I will carry you.

And somewhere, much further along, the reflection may follow:

I have carried you.

For now, the distance between those two sentences does not need to be crossed.

For now, you may trust that you do not have to take every step yourself.

You are allowed to be carried.