Author: Tim Tebow
Date: Today, 7 March 2023
Publisher: Waterbrook
Length: 176 pages
ISBN: 978-0593194072
Quote: "We are each on a mission to make a difference."
And this book addresses readers as young as age ten--usually a pre-spiritual stage of life, but you never know--encouraging them to pay attention when their emotional hearts "ache for the kid in your class who always gets picked on" or feel "touched by a need" when they see TV commercials for charities.
Homeschooled preacher's kid Tim Tebow, best known as a football star, put most of the profits of his first career in sports into his charitable organization, but he launches this book with the story of how he invested time as well as money in proposing to his wife. A focus on the planning and staging, rather than "eww ick, mushy stuff," may keep this story interesting to middle school readers. Know your students.
Homeschoolers tend to push the envelope when it comes to imagining what children may be capable of. It works in the homeschool setting because parents usually have a good idea of how much their children understand.
I say "usually" because part of the normal human learning process seems to be that adults assume that a child who can do or understand A can also do or understand B, and this usually produces a manageable amount of stress as the child pushes itself to do or understand B. I've often reminisced about the things my father expected my brother and me to do just because I was able to see letters and sound out words at age four: "If the older one could read Disney picture books and Dr. Seuss at four, she ought to be reading news magazines and Bible stories at five, and the younger one ought to be reading picture books at four likewise." We weren't. We had high I.Q.s and loved reading things ahead of "grade level," but Dad had few grown-up friends because of his tendency to expect even adults to learn more new information faster than they could. Then when his audience were thoroughly confused Dad was apt to start berating them for being "stubborn and stupid." So, at least we grew up with a solid role model of how not to teach. And so today, if this web site seems to assume that readers of one post know more than they do and readers of another post don't know as much as they do...I try to keep everything at this post accessible to a bright ten-year-old reader. Some posts will actually interest that ten-year-old reader and some will not. Since it's only a web site I do assume that readers can browse about, find their own level, and look up anything they don't understand. In real life I'd have audience reactions to go by; in writing I have to do the best I can, as all writers do. Tebow's writing a serious evangelical book for very bright ten-year-olds or, more likely, normal fifteen-to-twenty-year-olds is probably a reflection of his own early life, spending most of his time with highly educated, mentally active, adults who might have found in their clever child something they missed in most of their friends their own age.
This book will work for some middle school sports fans but I would emphasize that there's nothing at all to worry about if your own half-grown football fan prefers books with more pictures of actual games and less talk about missions and God. I'd be more concerned about a child if adults created pressure for the kid to show more interest in "spiritual things," even in Fellowship of Christian Athletes terms ("Celebrate God all day and every day. I mean...revel in Him!"). That generates a rebellious reaction in which "cradle Christian" teenagers seem to want to go out and do something they can repent of. While cultural expectations that this Rumspringe phase will merely bring the young back into the church seem to work for a majority of teenagers in Amish, Seventh-Day Adventist, and Southern Baptist communities, the Rumspringe experience can be dangerous for individual teenagers.
I would offer this book to any young reader who is interested in now-retired football stars, but I'd probably say something like, "Tebow grew up a bit different from the average kid. You might get more out of this book when you're in high school or college." And let all further discussion of the book begin with the student. Spirituality does not develop on the same schedule as language and math skills or physical growth do. Here I stand to testify that although I was sounding out words in adults' books and magazines at four, although I was the first skinny eleven-year-old to find a use for a bra in grade six, I didn't have an adult spiritual life before my early twenties. My "adult baptism" at sixteen turned out not to be a great mistake, but I wasn't altogether sure whether it was going to be a mistake during my years as a young "adult" church member.
For readers who aren't totally turned off by the story of a man's setting up an elaborate scene to propose marriage, Tebow goes on to share other stories of more interest to kids. As a homeschooler, he tells us, he was encouraged to socialize in a church that had a large youth group and staged lots of activities. The group had enough students to require auditions for their plays and pageants. "Eight-year-old Tim Tebow" was ordered to recite a poem he "mumbled...[s]taring down at my shoelaces" and rush through a rendition of "Jesus Loves Me" in which "Every sound...fumbled out of pitch. When I was done squawking the last line, I speed-walked to the side curtain." After this audition, due to family connections no doubt, he was given a part in the play and a position in the choir. Though "basically taking up space in choir due to my lack of talent," he came to feel real gratitude for the adults who "didn't see me as a one-sided jock" but patiently taught him to sing.
From such adults he also learned values like integrity ("While it's nice to be rewarded with stuff, it's more fulfilling to please our Heavenly Father"), gratitude ("when I shift to being grateful...the muscles in my neck relax"), and excellence ("Your Work Is Worship"). And he learned that your vocation to work, which may or may not be the job that pays your bills, is "your mission superpower."
For Tebow's target audience of talented teens...I'm one of the people who routinely use the term "teenagers" to include ten-to-twelve-year-olds who are developing the sense of purpose and ability to concentrate that are normally found in thirteen-to-sixteen-year-olds...it is commonplace to have a strong sense of vocation. A talent was probably noticeable before they were even five years old, though that's not always the case--sometimes kids don't have access to ways to develop and show their talents early in life, or their talents aren't recognized as "real" vocations because adults' prejudices suggest that things like cooking are less "real" vocations than things like teaching. (Grandma Bonnie Peters rebelled in youth against pressure to get a college degree and teach school, because that was the "upscale" thing for young ladies to do with their intelligence. Her vocation first manifested itself as a talent for cooking, and later matured into her vocation for home nursing, nutrition counselling, and life coaching.) Small children may also show a precocious talent that turns out not to be their vocation, as when my natural sister, who was able to sing on key before she was able to speak clearly, lost all ability to hear sounds in the soprano range at age five.
Most talented young people, however, do know what their talents are, and are ready to have a "first career," even if it's a short one, in middle school. We want them to keep learning and exploring different things but we need to let children use their talents and energy. Sometimes people still show vestiges of an archaic belief that every boy has to be a soldier and every girl has to be a mother, starting as early as possible--why make them wait till they're eighteen, when boys can fight and girls can get pregnant at fourteen! In fact civilized societies flourish when most men never have to go to war and most women never have to give birth. Focus on their other talents is probably best for society as well as for these individuals. Children should "start small" with relatively short work days, if possible, and "safe," well supervised tasks that won't compromise their ability to do other jobs later. There are still countries where giving kids jobs in textiles or machinery is the way nice people keep children from being recruited as pickpockets or prostitutes, but having them work with toxic waste, as has been reported in modern China, is going too far. In the United States we tend to go too far in the opposite direction, nannying at children who are perfectly happy with their first steps toward their vocations: "Put down that book, you read too much. Must you practice your music every day? Normal kids don't ask for math books for birthday presents--you'll never have any friends if you go on like that! You're too little to handle needles or hammers or whatever, you might cut yourself. There'll be plenty of time to sell things for money when you're grown up, don't start that now," and so on. Tebow encourages kids to take those first small steps into their vocations. Their work is worship. He's right.
He also sides with "Convictions Over Emotions": "[F]eelings come and go. [God's] love for us does not." This detail is important, yet divisive. It hinges on one of those physical differences we're not comfortable even recognizing--probably the only physical difference that needs to make any difference in the way people behave toward one another. "Race" doesn't matter at all when intelligent people want to accomplish something. Age and sex matter less than we might think. Even physical abilities can often be worked around. But the difference between introvert and extrovert brains may remain crucial.
In contemporary American society we often meet people who do have consciences, vocations, the ability to work alone, and even some conspicuous introvert-type talents and perceptions, who believe they are extroverts because they are not shy. This doesn't mean that they are extroverts in the sense that is relevant in the light of recent scientific discoveries, the sense of incomplete neurological development. It means that they're still using an outdated working definition of what appear to be introvert and extrovert behavior, according to which that mythical "balance" between the two is possible. People have either introvert or extrovert brains but a healthy introvert brain normally does develop social poise, especially under the guidance of healthy introvert adults who appreciate a quiet, focussed, talented child. Shyness is typical of adolescents who know they're raw beginners at most of the things they do, of extroverts who have less wealth or "looks" than those around them, and of introverts who've been emotionally abused by extrovert bullies who were not taught to be grateful for the attention they get. When we as a society become more vigilant about training children not to start a bullying relationship, saying things like "You're yapping at someone who wasn't even looking at you? How DARE you? Go to your room until you can get some control of that mouth!", then the stereotype of the socially awkward introvert will probably disappear.
The real difference between introvert and extrovert brains is not always obvious from behavior, but it's permanent and important. Introverts have convictions because, whatever specific talents our brains also develop, we all share the crucial part of the brain that links spirituality to the sense of right and wrong, the conscience, from which we make aesthetic as well as moral judgments. We need to heed and develop our consciences. Extroverts fail to develop the conscience, which is a real disability and needs to be recognized as one. They need help; they need guidance; they do not need a great deal of individual responsibility, because all they have to go on, when making decisions, are the emotions they feel primarily about other people's reactions to them. Because of this difference in the physical brain, extroverts remain stuck at what Kohlberg called a juvenile stage of moral development, while introverts reach what Kohlberg thought was moral maturity.
This doesn't mean that all introverts always behave well. Anyone can consciously choose wrong, for bad reasons, such as money or social pressure. Introverts do need to learn effective ways to communicate in situations where their moral senses and social senses conflict. Left to ourselves introvert children are likely to want to solve social problems by beating up bullies, thus putting themselves in the position of super-bully or else getting beaten up themselves, or screaming ineffectually at adults, thus usually getting a harsher reception than Greta Thunberg has so far received. We need positive instruction in how to communicate our beliefs, but the kind of "counselling" many adult introverts got in the 1970s and 1980s, which began with "feelings" and "Can you remember when you lost your warm fuzzy feelings toward other people? Who did what to you when you were just a baby or toddler? Was it your mother or your father? Did they actually molest you or did you just feel the way they cleaned your bottom as something like sexual abuse?" does no good at all. Neither did the milder, or New Age, version of "Let's all just go back to a more primitive level of civilization where nobody dared to make value judgments." For one thing that view of history is almost certainly false--when isolated primitive tribes failed to develop a coherent moral law they usually seem to have been dominated by superstitions about what might appease the hostility of their vicious "gods"--and moreover it's counterproductive for individuals and for society. We need to heed the moral judgments of enlightened people.
Tebow discusses what might be seen as the sad end of his first career in this context of where "feelings" fit in the Christian life of a neurologically complete adult, or what is now the objective scientific meaning of the word "introvert." "As I walked around the Star" in the Dallas Cowboys' extravagant complex, "I became swept up in unmet longings...I wish I had a chance to be a player in this facility...God, I wish You had a different plan. Seeing the Cowboys' facilities made me miss football," even though his adult moral sense knew, "My mission that day was to have an impact on a bunch of souls" as a preacher whose football career was over. Nobody can be a professional athlete forever and most athletes would do well to be thinking of their second careers as their adult careers, since most athletic competitions are dominated by the crazy teenage energy that just subsides when the body has stopped growing. Most of the time, Tebow tells us, he knows he's here to preach and "encourage" and raise funds for his charity, but he has moments when he misses football.
(Eventually, I'd like to encourage him, it settles down into pleasant nostalgia. Pleasant feelings associated with our adult careers displace the older memories of pleasant feelings associated with our earliest successes. This, too, is a physical process. During the process nostalgia can stab like a toothache as easily as it can give pleasure and inspire works of art, later. The challenge is to resist any temptation to "drink to forget" what we lose by growing up.)
For Tebow, whose own emotions must still be making strong waves in his consciousness, "feelings" are like the two wolves in the story he tells. Some readers may need to be reminded that for Native Americans the predatory animals, even the deadly dangerous wolf, bear, and eagle, were symbols of power rather than danger. Humans can tame and train those animals. Legendary heroes of American culture did that. So in the terms they used, it made sense to describe emotional energy as like "two wolves fighting" and one wolf being "good, kind, and generous" while the other was vicious. A wolf who became your friend and protector, like Julie's Amaroq in Julie of the Wolves, would fight off a hostile wolf who might want to eat you. Anyway, our emotions are like the two hypothetical wolves fighting. The one that wins is the one you feed. We can use our moral judgments to choose which emotion to feed our attention to.
This will not give teenagers, instantly, the power to snap into the emotional mood an emotional abuser might demand that they feel or simulate, Nor should it. Nor should they. Their feelings are their own and they have the right to feel tired, impatient, even frustrated by tasks they've not yet mastered. The rewards go to those who learn to work through those feelings.
Tebow's phrase is "Embrace the Grind." For every skill we learn there will be times when learning itself is difficult, and times when using what we've learned is boring. Rewards come to those who push through the drudgery to recover the joy and glory of their work.
Adult readers, at least, know where this book is going--the last full-length chapter will call attention back to a beneficiary of Tebow's charity, and the last page will be the Christian Altar Call--but this review leaves a good dozen stories for readers to discover in the book.
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