10,000 ReasonsSample

Lego Beach

There’s a beach all the way down on the southwest tip of England, in Cornwall, that people call Lego Beach. On any given day, after just a little digging, you’ll find a piece of Lego there. It’s all thanks to the fact that back in 1997 the container ship Tokio Express, bound for New York, was caught up in a storm twenty miles out. A freak wave—the kind only seen once every hundred years—lashed the ship. The Express tipped sixty degrees one way, then forty degrees back the other, and the corkscrew motion sent sixty-two shipping containers crashing into the sea. One of them just happened to be filled with Lego pieces. Four million, eight hundred thousand pieces, to be precise.

Humorously, among the usual Lego bricks and yellow figures were lots of nautical-themed pieces: pirate cutlasses, dragons, scuba gear, flippers, and spear guns. Two decades after the event, that brightly colored plastic is still washing up on the shore.

Lego Beach reminds me of what it means to adopt an attitude of worship. There’s never any shortage of treasure to find, never any lack of reasons to sing out our praises to God. Reminders of His goodness and greatness are washing up on the shoreline of our lives every single day. With our eyes open wide and a little digging around, we’ll soon find ourselves with plenty of reasons to worship Him.

From creation to the cross, from the incarnation to the resurrection and ascension, we never have to invent anything new. Worship is simply a contemplation of who God has already revealed Himself to be and how He has intervened in our lives. It’s never about inventing a new story; we’re just retelling the precious old story of how God involves Himself in our lives. We remember, and we reply. We recount, and we respond. This is the rhythm of worship: breathing in God’s wonders and then breathing out in awe and praise.

Think about those numbers for a moment.

After the Tokio Express was hit, it sent 4.8 million bobbing Legos into the water. It was enough to keep washing up on that Cornish shore for decades to come.

Two thousand years after Jesus’s birth, death, and resurrection, the goodness of our Lord keeps showing up daily in our lives as well.

If you think about it, “10,000 Reasons” is nothing short of a colossal understatement.