As a man walked a desolate beach one cold, gray morning he
began to see another figure, far in the distance. Slowly the two approached
each other, and he could make out a local native who kept leaning down, picking
something up and throwing it out into the water. Time and again he hurled
things into the ocean.
As the distance between them continued to narrow, the man
could see that the native was picking up starfish that had been washed upon the
beach and, one at a time, was throwing them back into the water.
Puzzled, the man approached the native and asked what he was
doing. “I’m throwing these starfish back into the ocean. You see, it’s low tide
right now and all of these starfish have been washed up onto the shore. If I
don’t throw them back into the sea, they’ll die up here from lack of oxygen.”
“But there must be thousands of starfish on this beach,” the
man replied. “You can’t possibly get to all of them. There are just too many.
And this same thing is probably happening on hundreds of beaches all up and
down this coast. Can’t you see that you can’t possibly make a difference?”
The local native smiled, bent down and picked up another
starfish, and as he threw it back into the sea he replied, “Made a difference
to that one!”
Each of us is but one person: limited, burdened with our own
cares and responsibilities. We may feel there is so much to be done, and we
have so little to give. We’re usually short of everything, especially time and
money.
When we leave this shore, there will still be millions of
starfish stranded on the beach. Maybe we can’t change the whole world, but
there isn’t one of us who can’t help change one person’s whole world. One at a
time. We can make a difference.
