I enjoy reading poetry. For a long time, that’s all I ever read. I have a first-edition book called The Ballad of the Brand written by Robert William Service. It’s exceptional. My favorite poem that he wrote is Carry On.
I would peruse poemhunter.com and read the poems of Langston Hughes, John Keats, Walt Whitman, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Burns, Edgar Albert Guest, William Butler Yeats, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and William Cowper.
Growing up, my dad had old encyclopedias from the early 1900s, and they each had a section of poetry. I would spend hours reading each one over and over. That is where I first read The Barefoot Boy.
Then a few years ago, while traveling through Virginia, we stopped at a church for a service, and I met a young man my age there.
He had a very encouraging and uplifting manner about him. One of the kindest people I’ve ever met.
After the service, we talked for a while and found out we both read a lot of poetry. He told me about a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow that I had never come across. He said it always motivated him.
He couldn’t remember all of it, but he wrote the last three stanzas on a piece of scrap paper, and I’ve gone back to those words many times.
The poem is called A Psalm of Life. I want to share those stanzas with you.
Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time;
Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.
Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.
Those stanzas spoke to me. I realized that I didn’t want to leave this world, not having impacted it for the better. In the last few years, one of my prayers has been, “Lord, help me to leave behind something good in this world that will outlast me.”
We leave footprints upon the sands of time.
Let us then be up and doing.
I don’t want to leave this life without having made a substantial, positive impact.
What will it be? I don’t know. Will it be tangible? Good question. Will millions know my name? I don’t think so.
What I do know is I have three sons.
And the longest-lasting impact I can make at this point in my life is to raise them right.
I believe those of us with children need to look them in the eyes every day and remind ourselves that they are absorbing every action and word.
Our greatest and longest-lasting influence in this world will be through them.
What kind of impression will it be?
God help me.
to those who are leaving footprints,
– Caleb
caneymountainblog.com 