"That's Why They Call Him the Streak!"

Back in the sixties and seventies there was a phenomenon gaining in popularity in western culture known as streaking. That is not what this post is about. Today, we are seeing the latest in a sports culture phenomenon where a “streak” of consecutive appearances takes on a life of its own.

Where one could see a misguided reasoning for running through a public place naked, streaking in the sports record books is a problem. The goal in any sporting event is to win, and in a team sport individual performance should always take a back seat to the needs of the team. When a player like Brett Favre gets too big and has a run of starts too large it simply hurts the team. The strategy of the coach is affected because he is not able to start another player and feels obligated to continue to play the player with the individual record even if that is not what is best for the team.

This is a human obsession. We love patterns and numbers and sometimes forms and sequences take on a life of their own. People are enamored with things as silly as when an arbitrary system of counting days renders a date like 8/9/10. (Even when much of the world would see that same day as being 9/8/10 and the actual date ends in 2010 not just 10.)

In our spiritual lives we do the same thing. We forget that our ultimate goal in life is to bring God glory and spread His story of salvation through the world. Instead we often see our spirituality measured by such trivial things like how many days in a row we keep a legalistic form of “quiet time” or how many Sundays of perfect attendance in Sunday School we can string together.

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