A campaign advert in the 1988 U.S. Republican leadership contest, eager to demonstrate how little impact George H.W. Bush had made as vice-president over the previous eight years, showed a man walking across a snowy landscape but leaving no footprints behind him.  It was a subtle yet devastating image.  The problem with footprints is that they lie behind our field of vision and we are not aware of what they look like unless we take the time to stop and look back (let’s face it, something everyone does when walking through freshly fallen snow!).  The author William Boyd has remarked: ‘the last thing you know about yourself is your effect’, and in our witness to Christ, I suspect we often fail to appreciate the mark we are making.  For some of us, the impact is much greater than we realise and so we are not as encouraged as we might be; for others, the impact may be closer to that image of the man walking across virgin snow but making little impact, the awareness of which should bring us up short.  Sometimes our witness to the Gospel is about as life-enhancing as stepping on someone else’s toes, and churches which specialise in this shouldn’t be surprised when newcomers take their feet elsewhere.

Nevertheless, there are times when we are not strong enough for the task at hand, and our witness to the Gospel is to have the grace to allow ourselves to be carried.  As the famous Footprints narrative suggests, sometimes it is the absence of footprints in the ground beneath us which testifies most to the wonderful grace of God.