Definition of "make do" [make do]

• To survive, get by with, or use whatever is available (due to lack of resources) (verb)
• To put into action (verb)
• To use for one's purpose something worn, defective, or intended for another purpose. (verb)

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• "Subconsciously he was still longing for Johann Smidt to stand behind him and tell him what to do, but apparently this private had been left to make do on his own."
• "If confronted with the evidence for Jesus having been just one in a long line of ‘dying-and-rising-god’ traditions, the clergy tend to take refuge in the unsatisfactory concept that the pagans of old somehow dimly perceived that one day there would be a real saviour god, but had to make do with a grotesque parody of the Christianity that was to come."
• "At six and five years of age, my mother and her brother Sima were old enough to ignore their growling stomachs and make do with nothing but a piece of black bread and a cube of sugar, but three-year-old Yuva, my uncle who would die during the first minutes of the blitzkrieg in 1941, clenched his fists and bawled from hunger."