A Fresh, New Perspective

Back when my wife and I got married, her great uncle gave us an antique table.  That was almost 10 years ago.  To this day, I don’t know if it’s better suited as firewood or if it’s actually worth something more.  What I do know is this:  It’s been broken since day 1.  It’s not so far gone that it needs to be hauled to the end of the driveway, but it can’t remain the way it is either.

We’ve been tolerating this broken table for nearly 10 years now and I've finally decided to fix it.  Why? Because we had new friends coming over.  It’s really not a big deal for us to sit at this broken table; it’s even ok when our family comes over.  When old friends come over, we just don’t go into the dining room because they know us well enough and we’re past the formality of sitting around a dinner table.  This time though, it’s different.  These folks don’t know us and we can’t let them know that there’s something wrong with our house or anything in it; at least not yet anyway. 

So I decided to fix the table.

Chantel and I spent about an hour and $6 to repair what has been broken for our entire marriage.  Why did it take so long?  We were comfortable with it.  Even with the broken table, things were ok.  Every once in a while, I would complain about it, every once in a while she would complain about it; but we never realized how broken it was until we evaluated it from a different perspective; a fresh, new perspective.

The table is now fixed and fully functional. 

I’m sure the friends that came over would have been fully accepting of our broken table, but we were fed up with it and had to do something about it.

I can’t help but wonder why sometimes it takes an outside person for us to realize how broken something is before we realize it’s significant enough for us to fix it.

Don’t let things get so broken that it seems beyond repair.  Take a look around the house for things that might be broken.

Sometimes, it can be fixed in a very short time with little to no expense.