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. A shipping container filled with millions of Lego pieces went under the waves off the coast in 1997, and the brightly colored plastic building toys—fittingly, many of them nautical or pirate themed—have been washing up ever since.

Oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer, who studies ocean currents, has been watching for signs of the plastic toys appearing elsewhere—it would have taken about three years, for example, for some of the bricks to be carried to Florida. But so far, it seems that the strip of sand in Cornwall is the only place to beachcomb for Lego pieces.

Ebbesmeyer still sees a lesson here though: "'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' … The incident is a perfect example of how even when inside a steel container, sunken items don't stay sunken. They can be carried around the world, seemingly randomly, but subject to the planet's currents and tides."

Possible Preaching Angle:

It's a principle that extends to spiritual life, too. What seems sunken far into the deep is rarely truly gone—for good or for bad. The experiences that shape us may sometimes seem inaccessible, but still often follow the currents and tides of our lives: washing up gradually into the visible world. The question is what we will do when we come across signs of them in our lives, sticking up out of the sand?