Once I see somebody in want (and I imply each definitions of “in want”—a destitute individual with a incapacity is one instance; my mother-in-law carrying groceries in from her automotive is one other), I generally tend to do nothing. Typically, I don’t do nothing—generally, I’ll fake I didn’t see them till the window of comfort for lending a hand has shut. Then, I make some obscure gesture as if to say, “Oops, sorry, perhaps subsequent time.” I’m not a sociopath; at the very least I don’t assume I’m. I do really feel a prickle of veritable pity; I don’t do something about it. Why? Maybe as a result of the prickle is, in truth, a bent itself, a deeper, far nobler tendency than the one I obey—the response I really feel, the motion I stifle. What I lack is just not the encouragement however the braveness.
It’s doable that I’ve by no means spoken to a person with extra braveness of this type than Tim Tebow, the philanthropist and former NFL quarterback who has confronted years of scrutiny for being outspoken about his Christian religion. But, he stays steadfast in his convictions—now channeling that very same resolve into his basis, which serves the MVP (most susceptible folks) of the world in additional than 100 international locations by way of his worldwide charitable basis. It’s simply as doable that the one lady I’ve met with the identical extraordinary braveness is Tim’s spouse, Demi-Leigh Tebow, the winner of Miss Universe 2017, who has devoted her life to serving the thousands and thousands of individuals trapped in and rescued from the worldwide human trafficking operation by way of her worldwide marketing campaign and alongside her husband’s group.
“Goodness can come from one easy act of obedience,” Demi tells me. For the Tebows, obedience is braveness. It’s appearing on the religion that what (or who) pricks our hearts is bigger than our zone of curiosity, our day or our profession. As Tim places it, it’s about dwelling a lifetime of significance over a lifetime of success.
“Success is about you. Significance is about different folks,” he says. “That are you chasing?”
Anybody who loves American soccer—and has since at the very least the aughts—remembers “Tebowmania.” Tim’s school and NFL profession (temporary because it was) is synonymous with the miracles that outlined it.
Historic miracles, like his changing into the primary sophomore to ever win the Heisman Trophy after a historic season as quarterback with the Florida Gators in 2007.
Cultural miracles, like when some 90 million folks Googled “John 3:16” throughout the 2009 BCS championship recreation to search out out why Tim had the verse stenciled in his eye black.
Athletic miracles, just like the 2012 AFC wild card playoff when Tim surprised Pittsburgh’s protection with a madcap 80-yard landing move to Demaryius Thomas on the very first play of extra time, sealing a win for the closely unfavored Denver Broncos.
And, most inexplicably, statistical miracles: In that very same Broncos-Steelers recreation, Tim totaled 316 passing yards with a median of 31.6 yards per completion. Pittsburgh’s time of possession was 31 minutes and 6 seconds. The sport’s Nielsen scores on CBS peaked at 31.6. Huge Ben Roethlisberger even threw an interception on Third-and-16. And all of it occurred three years to the day after the faculty nationwide championship recreation when Tim and “John 3:16” went viral.
“I actually imagine that sports activities is usually a catalyst for a lot good, a lot inspiration, for encouragement, for folks to rally collectively,” Tim says. “[But] I hope I don’t finish my life saying, ‘Essentially the most I gave was for a recreation.’”
One might say Tim’s life even began miraculously. His household was on a mission journey in a distant village within the Philippines when his mother was hospitalized with amoebic dysentery. They found she was pregnant with Tim whereas she was comatose and going through extreme issues that threatened each their lives. After a number of arduous months, end-to-end with white-knuckled prayers that the physicians’ grim prognosis would show unsuitable, Pam and Bob Tebow celebrated little Timmy’s protected arrival in August 1987. The mystified docs couldn’t clarify how he’d held on by a placental thread. The overjoyed Tebows, who’d held on by a prayer, might.
Tim was the fifth and closing Tebow child, the “miracle child” of the household. When he got here dwelling, his 9-year-old sister was so enthusiastic concerning the new child that she gave herself a literal hernia from carrying Tim round so typically. “There have been so many individuals [who] thought they had been Mother and Dad,” Tim laughs. Suffice it to say, all 5 children had heaps in widespread rising up in Jacksonville, Florida, as caregivers, as missionaries, as classmates (the Tebow children had been homeschooled) and, in fact, as athletes (middle-schooler Tim parroted his elder brother’s school baseball and soccer exercises). The Tebow family was based on care, prayer, educating and motivating. Little doubt that basis contributed to the work ethic of a first-round NFL draft decide, however Tim has one other tackle what customary him into the success story he’s in the present day.
Tim returned to the Philippines for a mission journey when he was 15, and there he met a boy named Sherwin. Sherwin was born with backward ft; the opposite villagers thought-about him a throwaway, an outcast, a curse. (This phenomenon, by the best way, is as widespread within the distant cultures of Filipino jungles as on the sidewalks of Washington, D.C. It’s like I confessed in my opener: What number of occasions have you ever and I walked previous Sherwin? What number of cultural curses will we perpetuate every day, after we look at somebody, pity them and transfer on?)
“I simply knew that he wasn’t cursed to God,” Tim says. “I additionally knew God was pricking my coronary heart, saying, ‘Yeah, however what are you going to do about it?’ That means, ‘[How] are your actions going to indicate what he’s price to you?’”
That extraordinary second laid the groundwork for Tim’s true success story, a vocation that each preceded and outlived his NFL profession. He began the Tim Tebow Foundation (TTF) in 2010 instantly after graduating school. Sherwin was on the forefront of Tim’s thoughts when he wrote the nonprofit’s mission assertion: “To deliver Religion, Hope and Like to these needing a brighter day of their darkest hour of want.”
TTF launched as merely orphan care outreach, however (within the attribute Tebow method) it got here off the snap with astonishing momentum. A 12 months later, the group introduced it was constructing a hospital specializing in pediatric orthopedic surgical procedures within the Philippines. The clinic opened its doorways, and a 12 months later, TTF launched Night to Shine, an annual, extravagant prom-night expertise for anybody 14 and up dwelling with disabilities. In the present day, it’s a worldwide motion—in 2025 alone, greater than 800 Night time to Shine occasions had been held in 63 totally different international locations. Greater than 600,000 folks with particular wants have had their Night time to Shine since 2015, every participant receiving a red-carpet welcome and every participant ending the night being topped king or queen. Tim fondly recollects the evening of the very first dance again in 2015, in North Carolina, standing other than the gang and watching the lights and royal revelry.
“I had tears coming down the edges of my face. I knew there was one thing particular with this, and this was precisely what I used to be alleged to do,” he says. He displays for a second, then provides, “What does ‘goal’ imply? The explanation one thing is finished, used, created or exists. While you really feel such as you get to live in your purpose, like a part of the explanation I used to be created and exist was for this—that’s a really particular second.”
On the opposite facet of the world, Demi-Leigh Nel-Peters was on her approach to being topped Miss Universe. The universe is a considerably greater province than what she was used to: Demi grew up on the Western Cape of South Africa in Sedgefield, slightly city with one visitors gentle and the motto, “The tortoise units the tempo.” A few of her most cherished childhood reminiscences are of farmers markets and seaside walks there, of sunny small-town days earlier than she discovered, in a tough manner, of the ever present darkness that comes with the universe.
Some three months after Demi was topped Miss South Africa in 2017, she was driving by way of a high-end a part of Johannesburg, alongside a busy avenue. It was early summer time and slightly after 5 p.m., so nonetheless daylight. As she stopped at a pink gentle, 5 males surrounded her automotive. One man pointed a gun at her head. When she tried giving up her automotive and exiting, he pushed her again into the seat saying, “You’re going with us.” Abruptly, every part from the self-defense workshops her dad had insisted she yearly take sprung to thoughts. She dealt her attacker a blow to the throat, scrambled out of the automotive and ran.
“I by no means, ever wish to victimize myself. I don’t know what the objective of my perpetrators had been,” Demi says. However the implications of the carjacking uncovered her to a horrifically pervasive evil, one which most individuals, together with her on the time, are shockingly blind to regardless of its enormity. The trendy slavery and human trafficking business generates someplace between at the very least $150 and $250 billion in illicit income yearly. And it’s rising: The United Nations experiences that between 2016 and 2021, the worldwide estimate of individuals trapped in pressured labor or pressured marriages rose from 40 to 50 million.
And Demi discovered a good bleaker fact that day, the reality of the axiom that every one that’s essential for the triumph of evil is for good folks to do nothing.
“I ran up that avenue in my six-inch excessive heels, and I began knocking on automotive window after automotive window,” Demi says. “I don’t know for those who imagine this, however no person would cease to assist me. That was in all probability probably the most horrific a part of the story, was knocking, asking for assist. Folks had their automotive home windows open. They may actually hear what I used to be saying. They may hear my voice. They may see the phobia in my eyes. And no person would cease to assist.”
It was a 19-year-old woman who ultimately rolled down her window and took Demi to security. “She confirmed me what it meant to actually be prepared to be interrupted, to be part of one thing that’s perhaps greater than simply your self,” Demi says. That “easy act of obedience” was merely to not ignore an issue—and it inspired Demi to not stay idle herself. She used her providentially timed platform as Miss South Africa (and, shortly thereafter, as Miss Universe) to launch Unbreakable, a marketing campaign effort that has since empowered 1000’s of girls internationally with hands-on self-defense workshops and helped open the blinds on the worldwide human trafficking disaster.
“[God] won’t ever waste ache that’s given to him,” Demi says. “I feel that incident is one the place [he showed] me, ‘In the event you’re prepared to let me have this ache, I can flip that into goal.’”
Demi handed on her Miss Universe crown in 2018, a deposition that she describes in her 2024 e-book, A Crown That Lasts, as letting go of a false identification and gaining new braveness and true goal: combating for individuals who can’t combat for themselves. And but it shouldn’t require a gun to our head to open our eyes to evil. Nor ought to it require a terror-stricken knocking on our window for us to supply help. Usually, it merely requires conviction of the unseen, religion within the pricking of our hearts.
It doesn’t take a miracle to do what you had been created to do. Nevertheless it does take what Tim calls “a braveness of conviction”—a motion of religion—to grasp what that goal is. Usually, our convictions are curved in on ourselves. What’s known as “self-realization” is normally only a good title for self-indulgence: “I’m aggressive, so I’ll commit myself to a recreation.” “I work onerous, so another person must do it.” “I’m resting, so I can’t arise.” Till we cease “following our hearts” and begin following the “pricking,” it’s no good pretending our convictions (i.e., our goal, our success) are something however the merchandise and servants of our personal inert egos.
Tim and Demi had outward-oriented purposes in widespread lengthy earlier than assembly in 2018, when Tim emailed Demi to ask her little sister Franje to attend a Night time to Shine occasion. Franje was born with out a cerebellum (a congenital situation so uncommon it’s solely been reported a dozen or so occasions) and was disabled her total life earlier than passing away in 2019 at 13. Demi says Franje has been her largest motivator, that her life was filled with “lovely God-wink moments” which have extra goal than she’ll ever perceive, like that horrific afternoon in Johannesburg. “I met my husband as a result of he invited my sister to promenade and never me,” Demi laughs, nevertheless it actually was Franje who crystallized their particular person functions into one.
Since their 2020 wedding ceremony, the Tebows have stood as a united entrance in a world typically too self-interested to note these in want. Demi doesn’t put on a crown anymore. Tim doesn’t play skilled sports activities. However now their lives are a joint service in chasing significance over success. Collectively, they’re advocating for people with particular wants, offering care and help for orphaned and susceptible kids, serving kids with profound medical wants and combating towards human trafficking and little one exploitation. Demi continues to unfold messages of fostering kindness and dwelling with goal by way of writing, having launched a kids’s e-book, Princess Paris Finds Her Purpose, in April. Not solely have they discovered braveness in each other however within the work they do.
“Our staff finds infants in trash cans and dumpsters and chilly rivers. It’s onerous to undergo these moments,” Demi says. “[But] I hope that my coronary heart by no means goes chilly to these issues as a result of that permits you to embrace that burden. It permits you to work with urgency and to not simply function in your timeline however to function on the timeline of the folks we get to serve.”
As soon as we now have the braveness to take heed to the pricking of our hearts (and the religion that it’s there), the pricking doesn’t stop. It isn’t an itch you’ll be able to scratch with success. No, as soon as you’re taking braveness, the subsequent prickle might be extra intense, extra vital—and so forth for the remainder of your life.
“To this present day, I feel I’ve given extra effort, vitality, depth, focus, all of that to a recreation. However I hope I get the prospect to alter that,” Tim says. “It’s not that the sport’s dangerous. I cherished the sport. I nonetheless love the sport. It’s simply, for those who love the sport, however you say you’re keen on folks—particularly [those in darkness]—much more, what would you be prepared to do for them?”
This text initially appeared within the July/August 2025 issue of SUCCESS journal. Photograph by Bianca Pierre
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