Saving Starfish

Well, we all know what today is, right? If your answer is, “the beginning of the National Football League’s Playoffs!” you would be correct, but that is not the only significance to this day.  Today is also the “Twelfth Day of Christmas”.  And you know what happened on the Twelfth Day of Christmas? “My dear love brought to me…” (Can you finish the lyric?)  What makes the Twelfth day important in many parts of the world is that it is the day of the Twelfth Night, which is, in some traditions, bigger than Christmas Day is in most of the western world.  The Twelfth Day is followed in the life of the Church by the first day of Epiphany, a day for a celebration feast.

So, I was doing my usual intense study for my sermon on Epiphany Sunday, paging through Sports Illustrated (Dec. 10, 2012), and I came across a story about a football player named Larry Fitzgerald. Mr. Fitzgerald is a receiver for the Arizona Cardinals football team. It turns out that Mr. Fitzgerald likes to travel the world and as he does so he does good things along the way. He helps children get fitted for hearing aids in Rwanda.  He plants trees in Ethiopia.  Next he is going on a mission trip to the strife-torn people in Darfur.  When asked about the reasons for his travels he told the SI reporter, “It gives you perspective.  If you get consumed by fame and fortune, your world can be a very small bubble. We have a lot of issues here, but they pale compared to around the world. Yet even in the poorest places I’ve been, people’s happiness isn’t dictated by their bank account.”  Mr. Fitzgerald then talked about his reason for being: “God didn’t put me on earth to amuse the masses but to do more.”  He explained his work by telling a version of the well-known story of a man who encounters a thousand starfish washed up on the beach. A stranger encounters the man as he is about to throw one starfish back into the ocean waters to save it.  The stranger tells him that he cannot possibly save them all, to which the savior replies, “But I can save this one.”

What gift are you bringing to someone you love on this Twelfth Day? You may not be able to save the world, and that’s alright, because Someone did that already.  But, may you awaken from your Twelfth Night to a blessed first day of Epiphany in which you will come to know how you can become a gift to some little starfish on some ocean shore of life.  Don’t let your happiness be dictated by what you have but by what you can give.  May you have an Epiphany this year as you discover why God put you here and may you become a Wise Man or Wise Woman who makes the journey you are called to make in this life, and to do the work you are called to do: saving starfish.