I had a dream. I was walking on the beach with God. We were the only two on the shore. God was very tall.

The first thing that struck me was that God was nothing like I thought he’d be. He was different, somehow. Much more complex. Much vaster. He was not merely some bearded guy in a tunic.

He was here, but also over there. He was up, he was down, he was above, below, inside, and out. He was the fabric of the air itself. When he walked alongside me, space-time seemed to bend as we passed by, making allowance for him.

As we walked, the waves of the ocean were crashing against the shore. Scenes from my life were playing overhead. Just like the old poem my mother used to have imprinted on a magnet stuck to our refrigerator. The one about footprints in the sand.

The scenes overhead were snapshots of my life. When I lost my first tooth. When I bought my first car. My wedding day. The time I got fired from my job. The times when my loved ones died. Each time my heart had been broken. Things like that.

I looked behind me and saw footprints in the sand. Two sets of footprints. One set belonged to the Great Artist. The other set belonged to me.

But I noticed something odd. During the low periods of my life, I saw more sets of footprints. First a few. Then dozens of them. The footprints were all walking alongside my own.

Soon, there were so many prints that they obscured mine. In some places, the sand looked like an entire football team had been performing drills on the shoreline. The throngs of prints carved deep trenches into the earth, filling with the water after each incoming tide.

The amount of footprints kept increasing as my life went on. During the most difficult periods of life, there were so many footprints on the shore, it looked like a village had been there. There were big footprints, tiny footprints. There were pawprints, too.

I said, “Lord, why are there so many footprints in the sand? Who do all these footprints belong to?”

He smiled and said, “My child, they’re all mine.”