• Walk lightly on the earth. 
• Take with you only memories. 
• Leave only footprints, random acts of kindness and scattered acts of grace.  
   

I have been thinking recently about what people leave behind.  In June, the NBA San Antonio Spurs traded Bruce Bowen.  Bowen won three championships with the Spurs; eight times he was named to the NBA's all-defensive team.  Many tributes to Bowen have appeared in San Antonio, some emphasizing his achievements as a player, but most emphasizing his achievements as a person.
 
Bowen participates in many community-service efforts, especially those working with at-risk youth.  Bowen was once such a child himself, with an alcoholic father and a drug-addicted mother.  In a moving tribute, Dawn Cole wrote of sitting in church next to her nine-year-old adopted son (who comes from a similar background), listening to Bowen tell his story - a story of love's triumph over indifference, of faith's victory over despair. 
 
Jan can tell another story about Bruce Bowen.  Jan belongs to The Compassionate Friends, a support group for parents whose children have died.  A woman came to a recent meeting, shortly after the death of her teenage daughter.  A few days after the girl's obituary appeared, her mother received a hand-written letter of condolence from Bruce Bowen, with a gift certificate to the spa salon owned by Bowen and his wife.  The grieving mother had never met Bowen; this story of his kindness never made the newspaper.
 
It is not just celebrities who leave footprints.  I think of Esther Harmon, who volunteered as a reading tutor at her local elementary school, touching the lives of a generation of children before she "retired" - at the age of 99!  Jan, and many others, fondly recall the footprints of her father, Reuben Pattillo (see her reflection below). 

Take another moment to consider what footprints you will leave behind, today.
 
Dawn Cole's tribute to Bowen concludes with a photo of her son's small hands holding an autographed basketball.  Below his signature, Bruce Bowen also wrote "Philippians 4:13."  That, Bowen told the audience, is his favorite Bible verse:  "I can do all things through him who strengthens me."