Why Wear Shoes: Some Grateful Reasoning

A boy once looked at his father and asked, "Why do we wear shoes?" The boys father knelt down and smiled. "Because it is easier to wrap your foot in leather than to wrap every stone and thorn in your path."

After hearing a longer variation of this story, I began to think about my own boots (pictured) and how worn they have become. The scuffs and scrapes have aged them quite well and the leather itself has lost much of its rigidity, becoming rather supple around the ankle but still serving the purpose of protecting my feet. Perhaps even serving as a poignant reflection of self.

What if we did wrap every hazardous surface in a protective material such as leather or foam? Can you imagine what the world would look like? Wood, glass, steel, stone, concrete, and asphalt all wrapped in soft, worn leather to protect us from getting injured. Obviously, this would never happen, even if only for the sake of preventing our landscape from becoming a boring shade of dark brown, but there are people who live there lives without an appreciation for life's obstacles and hazards and this, quite frankly, is a mistake.

Shoes are the solution to solving one problem, yet there are a myriad of other problems that we will face in our lives. Shoes not only help us overcome the problem of protecting our feet from the hazards of the ground, but they also enable us to approach new problems with new solutions and so forth.

J. C. Penny once said, "I am grateful for all of my problems. After each one was overcome, I became stronger and more able to meet those that were still to come. I grew in all my difficulties."

Responsible parents will child-proof a home when bringing home a new infant, but as that baby grows up, the responsible thing to do is to gradually expose that child to hazards and problems for the sake of learning what lies ahead, out in the world, enriching their offspring with the ability to protect themselves instead of expecting the world to be soft and accommodating forever.

We grow in trial and error, in struggle, in pain, in heartache, in obstacles and problems. Learn from this growth and be grateful for it.