My family tends to hold on to things till we can’t get any more use out of them.

Our last minivan had nearly 300,000 miles on it, shook when it got past 45 miles per hour and looked like a step down from the Flintstones car.

The only reason we gave it away was because members of our church said they were praying daily that we would come to our senses and get a new one before departing on a 5,000 mile road trip.

Growing up, we used the TV my father had in his childhood. It was so old that when we plugged in our brand new Xbox (through the VCR) we realized the TV was so old it could only show our video games in black and white. We ended up asking my dad if we could get a new TV instead of eating out for a year.

We all grow accustomed to the familiar, and many of us don’t like change, or in my case, are too lazy to make the change.

Going into college I had a pair of shoes that I bought my junior year of high school. I marched in the band, played street basketball, ran in them – I had those shoes broken-in perfectly.

But then I kept on wearing them.

There comes a point in every pair of shoes’ life when they pass being “broke-in” and become just “broke.”

A few years pass and I go to Oxford with Study Abroad. Anyone who has spent a semester across the pond knows there’s a lot of walking. One mile to the grocery store, two to your favorite restaurant and three to the Church of Christ. And there I was walking around in those raggedy old shoes.

My parents came to visit after two months ,and the first thing my mother did, after giving me a hug, was scream at my shoes.

She couldn’t believe I was parading around in the motherland with my big toe poking out of a hole and giving the Woodrow family a bad name.

Her solution was to rip my shoes off, then rip my fathers shoes off and put them on me.

They were some really nice shoes!

I had got mine at Costco for $16. These cost over five times that, and were made for walking in comfort. My feet hadn’t known what they were missing. I didn’t know how sore my feet had been at night until they no longer hurt.

So while I could have gone the rest of the year and most of the year after that without a new pair of shoes, I was instead pampered by new footwear.

I know many of us tolerate, but are why should we? If God has blessed us with the capabilities to change things and make ourselves happy why don’t we more often?

A new pair of shoes is relatively small, but what are some other things that we can fix in order to make life a little better for us all?