A beach near Perranporth, Cornwall (in Great Britain) is unlike any other stretch of coast in the world. Not for its breakers or sand, but for what washes up in the surf: Tens of thousands of toy Lego bricks. Back in 1997, a shipping container filled with millions of Lego pieces went under the waves off the coast. As a result, 62 containers onboard the ship went overboard, and one of those containers had nearly 4.8 million pieces of Lego bound for New York.

No-one knows exactly what happened next, or even what was in the other 61 containers, but Lego pieces started washing up in both the north and south coasts of Cornwall. And in a quirky twist, many of the Lego items were nautical-themed, so locals and tourists alike have found miniature cutlasses, flippers, spear guns, seagrass, and scuba gear as well as dragons.

A U.S. oceanographer named Curtis Ebbesmeyer, who studies ocean currents and has been studying the story of the Lego pieces on the coast of Cornwall, offered a simple lesson. He said,

The most profound lesson I've learned from the Lego story, is that things that go to the bottom of the sea don't always stay there … They can be carried around the world, seemingly randomly, but subject to the planet's currents and tides. The incident is a perfect example of how even when inside a steel container, sunken items don't stay sunken.

Possible Preaching Angles: Certain things in the spiritual life—especially our sins and our wounds—don't stay sunken forever. Like the Lego pieces, these spiritual realities will eventually rise to the surface. The question is what we will do when we come across signs of them in our lives, sticking up out of the sand?