Making A Difference

A man was walking down a deserted Mexican beach at sunset.
As he walked along, he began to see another man in the distance.
And as he grew nearer, he noticed that the local native kept leaning down, picking up something, and throwing it out into the water.
Time and again he kept hurling things out into the ocean.

As he approached even closer, he noticed that the man was picking up starfish that had washed up onto the beach, and one at a time, he was throwing them back into the ocean.

The first man was puzzled. He approached the man and said, "Good evening friend, I was wondering what are you doing?" And he replied, "I'm throwing these starfish back into the ocean. You see, it's low tide right now and all these starfish have been washed up onto the shore. If I don't throw them back into the sea, they will die from lack of oxygen."

"I understand," the man replied "but there must be thousands of starfish on this beach and you couldn't possibly get to all of them. There are simply too many and don't you realize that this is happening on hundreds of beaches up and down this coast ... can't you see that you can't possibly make a difference?"

The local native smiled, bent down, picked up yet another starfish ... and as he threw it back out into the sea, he replied, "It made a difference to that one!"

We may feel we cannot make a difference in this world today, but we can make a difference in one life at a time.