The National Football League draft will be held on Saturday and Sunday, April 25-26. The first two rounds will be held on Saturday, and the final five rounds will be held on Sunday. In these days leading up to the draft, all of the teams in the NFL are busy evaluating talent. For the past several years, scouts from each of the teams have been looking at players as they played games on the college level. Now the evaluation is even more exacting. Scouts and team leaders are timing runs, measuring distances jumped, counting the number of times the players can lift weights, and giving intelligence tests. When all of this is completed, each team will go into the draft with a list of the players they feel will do the best on the professional level.
In spite of all of this evaluation, sometimes the teams miss it completely. They draft players in the first rounds that don’t even make the squad. And sometimes they overlook the best players available. Tom Brady of the New England Patriots, one of the best quarterbacks in the NFL, was not drafted until the sixth round. Tony Romo, quarterback of the Dallas Cowboys, was not drafted at all. These and many others were completely overlooked by the best judges of football talent in the world.
It should come as no surprise that we are as inept as they when it comes to spotting talent. When Dennis Rodman was finishing his career in professional basketball, he was offered a role in a movie. When the movie was released, one reviewer said of Rodman’s acting, “If he were on fire, he couldn’t act as if he were burning.†Now that’s a lack of acting ability.
If some have the penchant for seeing gifts that do not exist, probably more of us are guilty of failing to be sensitive to the presence of gifts that do exist. It’s been said that there is something that is finer and rarer than ability; it is the ability to recognize ability.
No one did that like Jesus. He was constantly calling people and calling out their gifts. His twelve disciples are a striking example of that. Jesus chose people that the world had largely overlooked. He enlisted some fishermen from the Sea of Galilee to follow Him. He invited a tax collector to be His disciple. He called a flaming revolutionary named Simon the zealot to share His message of peace. There were others of whom we know even less. Robert Coleman called these twelve disciples “a ragged aggregation of souls.â€
But under the tutelage of Jesus and the power of His life, these twelve men emerged as the most significant band of disciples who ever existed. They touched and changed their world. Now, 2,000 years after they lived, we still study their lives and pore over their words.
Gold prospectors have a distinct quality. They have the habit of never throwing anything away without taking a second look. As we look for the gold of gifts hidden in the lives of others, we need to do the same.
