Have you ever put a message in a bottle and then thrown it into the ocean?

More importantly, has anyone ever come across it years later?

Believe it or not, there are actually people who keep track of this sort of thing.

According to the Message in a Bottle Hunter website, the world’s oldest seagoing message in a bottle is almost 132 years old. It was dropped into the Indian Ocean by a German research vessel studying ocean currents in 1886, and was found on a beach in Western Australia in 2018. (Wikipedia records an even older message, a Japanese one found after 151 years afloat.)

Bottled messages have travelled many thousands of miles. The farthest recorded distance travelled is probably the one that floated from New Zealand to Spain, almost an antipodean journey.

Perhaps the most romantic message in a bottle story concerns Swedish sailor Ake Viking. In 1956, he stuffed the message “To Someone Beautiful and Far Away” into a bottle and cast it into the sea. It was later retrieved by a young woman named Paolina in Sicily. Their subsequent correspondence culminated in marriage in 1958, with the wedding ceremony attracting 4,000 people.

We marvel at events like these: the idea that something thought lost and forgotten can show up decades later.

But there are some things we don’t want to come across again.

Who wants to be reminded of a sordid episode in our past—something that we did that now makes us cringe with regret and horror?

Fortunately, once our sins have been forgiven by God, they won’t wash up on a beach somewhere to accuse us.

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