One at a time

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 nearer, he noticed 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 wandering 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", my 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 realise that this 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 yet another starfish, and as he threw it back into the sea, he replied, "Made a difference to that one"
There are many problems in a man's life. In this story, the problems of Evil are God's, as many people have turned from God, so the Starfish are washed up on the shore, and will die without his help. These "problems" can be solved, one by one.
But when the problems seem unsurmountable, endless, recurring and impossibly vast, working through them one by one can seem to be a ludicrous waste of time. Many people would not bother. They would ignore them.
If you ignore them however, they become worse over time, strangling your life.
"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 realise that this 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?"

by Jack Canfield and Mark V. Hansen