By admin 
When I see someone in need (and I mean both definitions of “in need”—a destitute person with a disability is one example; my mother-in-law carrying groceries in from her car is another), I have a tendency to do nothing. Sometimes, I don’t do nothing—sometimes, I’ll pretend I didn’t see them until the window of convenience for lending a hand has shut. Then, I make some vague gesture as if to say, “Oops, sorry, maybe next time.” I’m not a sociopath; at least I don’t think I am. I do feel a prickle of veritable pity; I don’t do anything about it. Why? Perhaps because the prickle is, in fact, a tendency itself, a deeper, far nobler tendency than the one I obey—the reaction I feel, the action I stifle. What I lack is not the encouragement but the courage.
It’s possible that I’ve never spoken to a man with more courage of this sort than Tim Tebow, the philanthropist and former NFL quarterback who has faced years of scrutiny for being outspoken about his Christian faith. Yet, he remains steadfast in his convictions—now channeling that same resolve into his foundation, which serves the MVP (most vulnerable people) of the world in more than 100 countries through his international charitable foundation. It’s just as possible that the only woman I’ve met with the same extraordinary courage is Tim’s wife, Demi-Leigh Tebow, the winner of Miss Universe 2017, who has dedicated her life to serving the millions of people trapped in and rescued from the global human trafficking operation through her international campaign and alongside her husband’s organization.
“Goodness can come from one simple act of obedience,” Demi tells me. For the Tebows, obedience is courage. It’s acting on the faith that what (or who) pricks our hearts is greater than our zone of interest, our day or our career. As Tim puts it, it’s about living a life of significance over a life of success.
“Success is about you. Significance is about other people,” he says. “Which are you chasing?”
Anyone who loves American football—and has since at least the aughts—remembers “Tebowmania.” Tim’s college and NFL career (brief as it was) is synonymous with the miracles that defined it.
Historical miracles, like his becoming the first 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 people Googled “John 3:16” during the 2009 BCS championship game to find out why Tim had the verse stenciled in his eye black.
Athletic miracles, like the 2012 AFC wild card playoff when Tim stunned Pittsburgh’s defense with a madcap 80-yard touchdown pass to Demaryius Thomas on the very first play of overtime, sealing a win for the heavily unfavored Denver Broncos.
And, most inexplicably, statistical miracles: In that same Broncos-Steelers game, Tim totaled 316 passing yards with an average of 31.6 yards per completion. Pittsburgh’s time of possession was 31 minutes and 6 seconds. The game’s Nielsen ratings on CBS peaked at 31.6. Big Ben Roethlisberger even threw an interception on 3rd-and-16. And it all happened three years to the day after the college national championship game when Tim and “John 3:16” went viral.
“I really believe that sports can be a catalyst for so much good, so much inspiration, for encouragement, for people to rally together,” Tim says. “[But] I hope I don’t end my life saying, ‘The most I gave was for a game.’”
One could say Tim’s life even started miraculously. His family was on a mission trip in a remote village in the Philippines when his mom was hospitalized with amoebic dysentery. They discovered she was pregnant with Tim while she was comatose and facing severe complications that threatened both their lives. After several arduous months, end-to-end with white-knuckled prayers that the physicians’ grim prognosis would prove wrong, Pam and Bob Tebow celebrated little Timmy’s safe arrival in August 1987. The mystified doctors couldn’t explain how he’d hung on by a placental thread. The overjoyed Tebows, who’d hung on by a prayer, could.
Tim was the fifth and final Tebow kid, the “miracle baby” of the family. When he came home, his 9-year-old sister was so enthusiastic about the new baby that she gave herself a literal hernia from carrying Tim around so often. “There were so many people [who] thought they were Mom and Dad,” Tim laughs. Suffice it to say, all five kids had lots in common growing up in Jacksonville, Florida, as caregivers, as missionaries, as classmates (the Tebow kids were homeschooled) and, of course, as athletes (middle-schooler Tim parroted his elder brother’s college baseball and football workouts). The Tebow household was founded on care, prayer, teaching and motivating. No doubt that foundation contributed to the work ethic of a first-round NFL draft pick, but Tim has another take on what fashioned him into the success story he is today.
Tim returned to the Philippines for a mission trip when he was 15, and there he met a boy named Sherwin. Sherwin was born with backward feet; the other villagers considered him a throwaway, an outcast, a curse. (This phenomenon, by the way, is as common in the remote cultures of Filipino jungles as on the sidewalks of Washington, D.C. It’s like I confessed in my opener: How many times have you and I walked past Sherwin? How many cultural curses do we perpetuate daily, when we glance at someone, pity them and move on?)
“I just knew that he wasn’t cursed to God,” Tim says. “I also knew God was pricking my heart, saying, ‘Yeah, but what are you going to do about it?’ Meaning, ‘[How] are your actions going to show what he’s worth to you?’”
That extraordinary moment laid the groundwork for Tim’s true success story, a vocation that both preceded and outlived his NFL career. He started the Tim Tebow Foundation (TTF) in 2010 immediately after graduating college. Sherwin was at the forefront of Tim’s mind when he wrote the nonprofit’s mission statement: “To bring Faith, Hope and Love to those needing a brighter day in their darkest hour of need.”
TTF launched as simply orphan care outreach, but (in the characteristic Tebow technique) it came off the snap with astonishing momentum. A year later, the organization announced it was building a hospital specializing in pediatric orthopedic surgeries in the Philippines. The clinic opened its doors, and a year later, TTF launched Night to Shine, an annual, extravagant prom-night experience for anyone 14 and up living with disabilities. Today, it’s a worldwide movement—in 2025 alone, more than 800 Night to Shine events were held in 63 different countries. More than 600,000 people with special needs have had their Night to Shine since 2015, each participant receiving a red-carpet welcome and each participant ending the evening being crowned king or queen. Tim fondly recalls the night of the very first dance back in 2015, in North Carolina, standing apart from the crowd and watching the lights and royal revelry.
“I had tears coming down the sides of my face. I knew there was something special with this, and this was exactly what I was supposed to do,” he says. He reflects for a moment, then adds, “What does ‘purpose’ mean? The reason something is done, used, created or exists. When you feel like you get to live in your purpose, like part of the reason I was created and exist was for this—that’s a very special moment.”
On the other side of the world, Demi-Leigh Nel-Peters was on her way to being crowned Miss Universe. The universe is a somewhat bigger province than what she was used to: Demi grew up on the Western Cape of South Africa in Sedgefield, a little town with one traffic light and the motto, “The tortoise sets the pace.” Some of her most cherished childhood memories are of farmers markets and beach walks there, of sunny small-town days before she learned, in a hard way, of the ubiquitous darkness that comes with the universe.
Some three months after Demi was crowned Miss South Africa in 2017, she was driving through a high-end part of Johannesburg, along a busy avenue. It was early summer and a little after 5 p.m., so still daylight. As she stopped at a red light, five men surrounded her car. One man pointed a gun at her head. When she tried giving up her car and exiting, he pushed her back into the seat saying, “You’re going with us.” Suddenly, everything from the self-defense workshops her dad had insisted she annually take sprung to mind. She dealt her attacker a blow to the throat, scrambled out of the car and ran.
“I never, ever want to victimize myself. I don’t know what the goal of my perpetrators were,” Demi says. But the implications of the carjacking exposed her to a horrifically pervasive evil, one that most people, including her at the time, are shockingly ignorant of despite its enormity. The modern slavery and human trafficking industry generates somewhere between at least $150 and $250 billion in illicit profits every year. And it’s growing: The United Nations reports that between 2016 and 2021, the global estimate of people trapped in forced labor or forced marriages rose from 40 to 50 million.
And Demi learned an even bleaker truth that day, the truth of the axiom that all that’s necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing.
“I ran up that avenue in my six-inch high heels, and I started knocking on car window after car window,” Demi says. “I don’t know if you believe this, but nobody would stop to help me. That was probably the most horrific part of the story, was knocking, asking for help. People had their car windows open. They could literally hear what I was saying. They could hear my voice. They could see the terror in my eyes. And nobody would stop to help.”
It was a 19-year-old girl who eventually rolled down her window and took Demi to safety. “She showed me what it meant to truly be willing to be interrupted, to be a part of something that’s maybe bigger than just yourself,” Demi says. That “simple act of obedience” was simply to not ignore a problem—and it encouraged Demi to not remain idle herself. She used her providentially timed platform as Miss South Africa (and, shortly thereafter, as Miss Universe) to launch Unbreakable, a campaign effort that has since empowered thousands of women internationally with hands-on self-defense workshops and helped open the blinds on the global human trafficking crisis.
“[God] will never waste pain that’s given to him,” Demi says. “I think that incident is one where [he showed] me, ‘If you’re willing to let me have this pain, I can turn that into purpose.’”
Demi passed on her Miss Universe crown in 2018, a deposition that she describes in her 2024 book, A Crown That Lasts, as letting go of a false identity and gaining new courage and true purpose: fighting for those who can’t fight for themselves. And yet it shouldn’t require a gun to our head to open our eyes to evil. Nor should it require a terror-stricken knocking on our window for us to offer assistance. Often, it simply requires conviction of the unseen, faith in the pricking of our hearts.
It doesn’t take a miracle to do what you were created to do. But it does take what Tim calls “a courage of conviction”—a movement of faith—to understand what that purpose is. Often, our convictions are curved in on ourselves. What’s called “self-realization” is usually just a nice name for self-indulgence: “I’m competitive, so I’ll devote myself to a game.” “I work hard, so someone else ought to do it.” “I’m resting, so I will not stand up.” Until we stop “following our hearts” and start following the “pricking,” it’s no good pretending our convictions (i.e., our purpose, our success) are anything but the products and servants of our own inert egos.
Tim and Demi had outward-oriented purposes in common long before meeting in 2018, when Tim emailed Demi to invite her little sister Franje to attend a Night to Shine event. Franje was born without a cerebellum (a congenital condition so rare it’s only been reported a dozen or so times) and was disabled her entire life before passing away in 2019 at 13. Demi says Franje has been her biggest motivator, that her life was full of “beautiful God-wink moments” that have more purpose than she’ll ever understand, like that horrific afternoon in Johannesburg. “I met my husband because he invited my sister to prom and not me,” Demi laughs, but it truly was Franje who crystallized their individual purposes into one.
Since their 2020 wedding, the Tebows have stood as a united front in a world often too self-interested to notice those in need. Demi doesn’t wear a crown anymore. Tim doesn’t play professional sports. But now their lives are a joint service in chasing significance over success. Together, they’re advocating for individuals with special needs, providing care and support for orphaned and vulnerable children, serving children with profound medical needs and fighting against human trafficking and child exploitation. Demi continues to spread messages of fostering kindness and living with purpose through writing, having released a children’s book, Princess Paris Finds Her Purpose, in April. Not only have they found courage in one another but in the work they do.
“Our team finds babies in trash cans and dumpsters and cold rivers. It’s hard to go through those moments,” Demi says. “[But] I hope that my heart never goes cold to those things because that allows you to embrace that burden. It allows you to work with urgency and not to just operate on your timeline but to operate on the timeline of the people we get to serve.”
Once we have the courage to listen to the pricking of our hearts (and the faith that it’s there), the pricking does not cease. It is not an itch you can scratch with success. No, once you take courage, the next prickle will be more intense, more significant—and so on for the rest of your life.
“To this day, I think I’ve given more effort, energy, intensity, focus, all of that to a game. But I hope I get the chance to change that,” Tim says. “It’s not that the game’s bad. I loved the game. I still love the game. It’s just, if you love the game, but you say you love people—especially [those in darkness]—even more, what would you be willing to do for them?”
This article originally appeared in the July/August 2025 issue of SUCCESS magazine. Photo by Bianca Pierre