Made A Difference to That One

We went down to the beach for Spring Break. Will was able to join us for a couple days and then some other friends and their kids came down. Monday night/Tuesday morning there was a string of awful storms...didn't really think much of it until we went back out to the beach Wednesday afternoon. It was way to cold to swim, but the kids wanted to dig in the sand (and who can blame them) so of we went. I have been going to this same beach forever and have never seen anything like this before: starfish; hundreds of them, filling the tidepools, covering the sand. It wasn't until we got back to the house and saw a report on the news that I understood...the storms Monday night had knocked the starfish loose from the rocks and washed them ashore. All the kids were a little wary of touching them...but not Liam! He walked right over, picked up two and proceeded to take them back to the ocean.

This story is from one of the Chicken Soup for the Soul Books:

A friend of ours was walking down a deserted Mexican beach at sunset. As he walked along, he began to see another man in the distance. As he grew closer, he noticed that the local native kept leaning down, picking something up, and throwing it out into the water. Time and again he kept hurling things out into the ocean. As our friend approached even closer, he noticed that the man was picking up starfish that had been washed up on the beach and, one at a time, he was throwing them back into the water. Our friend was puzzled. He approached the man and said "Good evening, Friend. I was wondering what you are 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."
"I understand," our friend replied, "but there must be thousands of starfish on this beach. You can't possibly get to all of them. There are simply too many. And don't you realize it is probably happening on hundreds of other beaches all up and down the coast. Can't you see that you can't possibly make a difference?"
The local native smiled, bent down, and picked up yet another starfish, and as he threw it back into the sea, he replied, "Made a difference to that one!"