I recently read in a magazine that there is something like 30 thousand tons of plastic alone in the ocean.
Combine that with all the other trash, and that’s a lot of garbage!
Lately we have been running on the beach in the mornings.
Sometimes I like to sit and watch people, but more than anything I have noticed the amount of trash littered along the sand.
Many people come and go throughout the day to recreate, and yet, everyone seems to be oblivious to the amount of trash lying around them that could so easily be picked up and thrown away.
After a few days of observing, Leah, James, and I decide to pick up the trash along the beach.
In less than a quarter of a mile, we filled 3 black heavy-duty garbage bags.
Once again, that’s a lot of garbage.
If we stand back and look at the big picture, think of all the garbage, and all the beaches in the world, it would be easy to say that we couldn’t possibly make a difference.
At the same time, if we all walked around never doing anything, because of that very reason, it would be a sad and miserable world.
The other day I had a man ask me what I wanted to do with my future.
I told him about my desire to finish college, and my ideal job of being the Recreation Director of a forest or National Park.
He then asked me why I was traveling around the world on a mission trip if I didn’t want to be a full time missionary in the future.
He said to me that I couldn’t be both, that I have to choose between one or the other and left it at that, almost as if I was wasting my time.
I sit on the beach and I wonder to myself if I really can make a difference.
I’d like to think that in my lifetime that just maybe I can make a difference in at least one life.
Just as I’d like to think that the act of picking up a few pieces of trash can make a difference to the environment.
The truth is that although it really doesn’t matter, it really does!
If everyone chose to do the things that mattered, to help a neighbor, visit the elderly, love a child, feed the hungry, cloth the poor, this world would be a far better place.
The truth is, we can never really know when we are making a difference, but that’s not what matters.
Whether it is a smile, a laugh, an act of kindness, service, or a gesture, it’s the act that is more important than the result.
I have found, more and more as we travel the world, that it is the small things we do that seem to make the biggest difference and create lasting effects.
The things unplanned, that just seem to fall into place, that make you know that there is a God that created you for that very specific purpose.
