Broken Streaks

This has been the week for broken streaks. The Indianapolis Colts finally lost at home after 12 or 13 consecutive home victories. But even in their victory, the Pats were crying about "extra crowd noise" being pumped into the stadium. My streak of 8 consecutive wins at Free Cell on my office computer was broken as well. I was feeling like I was in the zone too, on my way to break my record streak of 16 wins. I guess I got overconfident and played a few bad cards.

Breaking a streak can have very consequential effects on our lives. Just ask people in the southeastern US what it's like to finally break the streak of rainless days and get some much needed water from the sky. Your checkbook can balance perfectly for months and then a careless error in the wrong column can crush your finances.

Sometimes the timing of the end of a streak is of more consequence than the actual ending itself. Just imagine if Cal Ripken, Jr. had suffered some injury that sidelined him just a few games away from breaking Lou Gehrig's record of 2,130 consecutive games played. Can you imagine being second on the list after almost twenty years of never missing a game? It would still be an accomplishment, but people would probably remember the injury more than the total.

Our ordinary lives are full of winning streaks that we don't notice until they are broken. We may not know that we have been happy for 187 consecutive days until something comes along to bring us grief. We usually don't realize that we have been "living on top of the mountain" of our faith journeys for 13 straight months until we have spent a week or two in the valley.

Honestly, we don't even think of our lives in terms of streaks so the metaphor may be a useless one. We do think of our lives in terms of good times and bad times, strong moments and weak moments. And we prefer for the good and strong to be longer in duration than the bad and weak. My thoughts for today are, "What do we do when the streak is broken?" What do YOU do?