An Adel By Any Other Name

I make no secret of being a sports fan.  I’ve loved sports ever since I can remember.  And yet, I was never really very good at any of them.  I simply was never an athlete.  I never really did try football and I gave up on basketball after the eighth grade.  I stayed with baseball through my high school years, but I still wasn’t very good.  The things I was best at were things like bunting and drawing walks, which are skills, but which don’t really require athletic ability.  The same could be said of the one sport that I’m at least half-way decent at, bowling.  I’m not knocking bowling, but it’s really more of a skill than an athletic feat, at least on the amateur level.

It doesn’t seem fair, you know?  The Lord gave me a great love of sports, and yet gave me no ability to play them.  I’ve wondered why, and I think I finally figured it out.  It’s not God’s fault.  It’s the fault of my parents.  And it’s their fault because of the name they gave me--Jeff Adel.

There has never been a major league baseball player with the last name of Adel.  There has never been an NFL player with the last name of Adel.  In just the last week, we had the first NBA player named Adel—Deng Adel.  He's basically the last man off the bench for the worst team in the league (Cleveland), but at least he’s there.  I’m putting a lot of hopes on him.

It gets a little better if you go to the name “Jeff”, but not much.  A few years ago, just for fun, I put together an “All-Jeff” baseball team.  It had some good players on it, but no Hall of Fame players or anything.  It’s the same way when you look at the NFL.  Things are a little better in basketball--you do get some pretty good players--but unless you include Michael Jeffrey Jordan you don’t really have any superstars.  It’s clear that by giving me the name “Jeff Adel”, my parents pretty much wiped out any chance I might have had to be a top athlete.

Does all that sound silly to you?  Well, if it does, there’s a reason for that.  It is.  It is silly.  Obviously, my name has nothing to do with why I was never a good athlete.  There are lots of reasons for it, including that I had no self-confidence and didn’t really want to do a lot of physical exercise when I was young, but I don’t really believe that my name is one of them.

But here’s the thing.  It can be very hard for us to admit our own shortcomings.  It can be very hard for us to admit that our problems and our failings and our weaknesses are actually our own fault.  Rather than do that, we’re tempted to look around for some other explanation, some way we can blame someone else.  And if we try hard enough to do that, we can always find a way.  We can always think of a reason to blame someone else.  The reason may not make sense to someone else, but most of us have a tremendous capacity to believe that the things we want to be true actually are.  In other words, we can make ourselves believe almost anything if we want to badly enough.

It can be hard to see ourselves clearly and admit to our own faults.  It can be even harder to admit to our sins.  But it’s a good thing to do.  Because if we can, then we can go to God, repent of our sins, and ask God for forgiveness.  And when we do that, God will forgive us every time.

I’m still going to root for Deng Adel to make it in the NBA.  I’m also rooting for Jo Adell, a minor league outfielder with the Angels, to make it to the majors.  But I know that God knows my name, and God is rooting for me to repent of my sins and ask for forgiveness.  With God’s help, I’ll do that.