THERE’S a famous old wisdom story that goes like this: A man was walking along a beach after a storm. The wind and waves had thrown hundreds of starfish onto the sand. Now the tide had gone out and left them stranded; dying in the sun.

In the distance he saw a young girl approaching. Every so often she would stop, bend down and throw something into the sea.

‘What are you doing?’ he asked her when she got closer. ‘Throwing starfish back,’ she said. ‘They’ll die if I don’t.’

‘There are hundreds of starfish and not much time,’ said the man. ‘I don’t think you’ll make much difference.’

The girl just bent down and sent another starfish spinning into the waves.

‘I bet it made a difference to that one,’ she said.

When we look at the immense problems the world is facing and the sheer number of people affected it is easy to feel like giving up, because any little thing we might do seems like such a drop in the ocean. That’s why words like ‘flood’, ‘swarm’, and ‘hordes’ are used — the problem seems overwhelming because of the sheer numbers involved.

But crowds are made up of individuals, each with their own life, their own story, their own hopes and fears. Rather than seeing the masses, we can choose to look at the faces.

There is a saying from the Jewish Talmud which is often quoted in relation to people like Oscar Schindler, who saved many people from the Nazi death camps: ‘Whoever saves a single life saves the world entire,’ or as Jesus put it: ‘In so much as you did it for the least of these you did it for me.’

By focussing on the little we can do rather than the massive amount, we discover we have saved maybe not the whole world but at least a little bit of it.