Footprints

“He who would leave footprints on the sands of time should wear his work shoes.” (LeGrand Richards)

I had this thought in my lexicon years before I had ever thought to do a weblog or leave some kind of memoir to my children or to my eternal record which I believe will be noted in each person’s heavenly ‘Book of Life.’ It was reinforced when I was courting my wife Cheryl. She sent me a card addressed to Wims. Queried as to what this (hopefully) endearing moniker meant she said, “It means that you have an invitation to Walk In My Soul.” Her soul. It implied to me that I, of course, had an obligation to walk carefully for the soul of another is sacred ground. I would have to walk carefully around the flowers she had planted and nurtured in the garden she had planted in the decades of her life before me. I have learned that you don’t want to clumsily leave footprints in the wrong places.

I have now done well over one hundred little essays in Omnium-Gatherum-Millerum. A few, I hope, have left footprints or a trail that others may choose to follow. Further, I hope that some of these essays, the deeply felt and well-crafted ones, have left the reader with a letter or two of my spiritual signature—a quality of my personality that remains, influenced by the giants in my life who have left deep footprints in my own soul and a path for me to follow. Following in their footsteps I hope that I may leave something that resonates with my readers that may give voice to some of the inchoate thoughts that they may have had.

What I do not want is the indictment that Tennyson (in a poem in the ‘Memoir’) gave to

“Your doctors, and your proctors, and your deans…
Against you, you that do profess to teach
And teach us nothing, feeding not the heart.”

A writer is identified in quality (and sometimes quantity) by his recurrent motifs. Like, I suppose, everybody, I seem to come back to familiar themes or more accurately variations upon a theme. Sometimes I come back too often, my wife tells me, especially to favorite stories or experiences or scriptures in my teaching. Of course she is probably right. But the fact remains that a speech, a sermon, an essay, a Sunday school lesson, even a conversation is usually forgotten, but what remains is the tone, the mood, the atmosphere, the feeling that is engendered or stirred up. The theme of my life—my values and aim—are hopefully emerging in these offerings, and I hope the good kernel that ‘feeds the heart’ comes to fruition and then the reader may blow the chaff away with a breath of charity.

So, I suppose I am all of a piece. As a daughter-in-law once said to me after reading something I had written, “That is so YOU.” I didn’t ask whether she felt it to be good; I hope it was. But some things you don’t ask.