Happy Feet

Today Toms Shoes is celebrating "One Day Without Shoes" and encouraging supporters to go barefoot as a means of raising awareness for the millions around the world who have no shoes to wear. Shoes are a great cause. Even in warm climates shoes protect feet from injury and from worms and other parasites. In some places children are not permitted to attend school unless they have proper footwear, so receiving a pair of shoes can be the means to an education.

I'm glad for this business/ministry that is willing to provide a new pair of shoes to be sent to a needy child somewhere in the world for every pair purchased on its website. The problem is that buying a pair of canvas shoes from their website costs $48.00.

On the other hand, last week I was able to buy 60 pairs of nice quality sandals on sale at Wal-Mart for 50 cents a pair. All together so far this year I've been able to buy 2,431 pairs of shoes and sandals to put into Operation Christmas Child shoeboxes and none of them cost over $1.00 per pair. By owning only a few pairs of shoes myself that I buy at rock-bottom sale prices I can finance the purchase of a lot more shoes to distribute to needy children than I could if I bought shoes regularly from Tom's site.

Think what it would mean to kids around the world if all of us gave up buying one pair of shoes this year and used that money to buy at least one pair to put in an Operation Christmas Child shoebox.

We could make a lot of happy feet.

(to learn more about OCC go to www.samaritanspurse.org You can search the website for 'Lejla Allison' to watch a video about a girl who learned about Jesus when she got a pair of white sneakers in her Operation Christmas Child shoebox in 1993.)