Through My Eyes

by Tim Tebow

  So one morning after breakfast, after Robby and Peter went out to work with Dad, I went straight to Mom. “I want to ask Jesus to come into my heart. I’m ready to be saved. I tried with Dad, but he’s just too hard.”

  Mom and I went over to the couch, and I prayed for Jesus to come into my heart. Since then, I’ve known that I am headed to heaven and have tried to live in a way that pleases Jesus.

  We all laugh about it now, but Dad will tell you that he is very glad I went to Mom that morning.

  And that afternoon we went to Epcot to celebrate.

  Chapter Four

  Preparing a Foundation

  For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.

  —ROMANS 1:16

  Every year, whatever sport was in season, we played it—my brothers and I. Since there were only three of us, we set up certain rotations in order to maintain fairness while still being competitive.

  For example, every time it would rain, we’d head out to play football in the yard. There’s something fun about football and mud. One of us would play quarterback, while the other two would face off against each other, with one as a receiver and the other the defensive back assigned to cover him. The receiver would have “four hard,” meaning four downs to score a touchdown. After those four downs, we’d rotate positions so that each of us would play each of the three positions at least one time through. If we played longer, we made sure we each played each position an equal number of times to fairly determine the winner. You’d get a point for scoring whether you were playing as the receiver or quarterback, while the defensive back would get a point for stopping you from scoring. In those early days, when we were still fairly small and our bones pretty resilient, we would also play tackle. It may just have been that my brothers only wanted to play tackle until I got bigger.

  We didn’t have a set score that we played to, but rather played until we got called to school, to work or eat, until someone got hurt, until we got into a fight with one another, or it got so dark that we finally could not see well enough to play.

  We played basketball in the rain as well, with puddles to navigate through and around as we tried to dribble. And forget hanging on to the ball when shooting. You simply tried to keep your hand as close as possible to the ball—as it began slipping out of your control from being so wet—and long enough to give one last guided push toward the basket with the hopes that somehow it would find its way there. We didn’t play in those conditions to make shooting difficult, but I’m convinced those years of informal “wet ball drills” probably helped my skills in both football and basketball.

  We weren’t always outside, although my mom probably wished we were. We had a version of the old “Oklahoma” drill that every football coach has run at practice at one time or another. We’d play in one of our rooms—usually the room of whoever hadn’t been in trouble lately. Two of us would stand at opposite sides of the room, one of us with a football. The third one would watch for Mom, since she had a strict no playing ball in the house rule, and do a bit of refereeing or breaking up a fight, if necessary, while waiting his turn.

  On a signal, we’d begin to run at each other, with the idea being that the defender would have to tackle the ball carrier before he reached the other side of the room. Our rooms weren’t all that big, so there was quite a lot of wrestling each other down to the floor before the guy with the ball reached the other side of the room.

  So we’d play until something was broken or Mom came and kicked us outside. But it was never as good a game outside as inside, where you were in a confined space with very little room for escape or maneuvering to get by. It was definitely a power game inside.

  Someone was always getting hurt when we played—regardless of the game. And it was usually Peter. Once we were playing a three-way game of catch in the yard. We were each a pretty good distance apart, forming the three points of a rough triangle, and instead of following the pattern that we had followed all that day, where Robby was throwing to me, Robby decided to switch things up. Thinking that Peter was looking, Robby crow hopped and wound up to put his full weight into the throw. Of course, Peter wasn’t looking, fully expecting that Robby would be throwing to me, as had been the pattern that day; and so we ended up having to take him into Mom with a bloody nose and bruised face for some patching up.

  Another time, we were playing baseball but decided to use a basketball instead of a baseball just to see what would happen. Nothing good, as it turned out, at least as far as Peter was concerned. I was pitching, and the bat richocheted with Peter—swinging as hard as he could to see how far he could hit the basketball—right into his face.

  More blood. More bruises. Back to see Mom.

  Our favorite Peter injury, however, was less about sports and more about one of his moments of pretending he was a superhero. Funny that a kid who is so smart could have done something so crazy. I was about eight when he climbed a rope which had been attached to the ceiling in the barn, and decided to swing from one end of the barn all the way to the other. All went well until his shin discovered, at a high rate of speed, the post-hole digger that hadn’t been put away and was sitting sideways in the barn, causing his shin to split wide open. Blood was everywhere.

  Enter Mom, once again, on the scene.

  Living on a farm, there was always a certain amount of excitement around the house, and if it wasn’t one of us getting injured, it was the realities of farm life that kept things interesting. On one occasion, my dad decided, this being a working farm and all, to have a controlled burn to get the weeds out of the pasture. Controlled burns were normal but occasional occurrences, and completely necessary in settings such as ours. Apparently “controlled” is in the eye of the fire starter, especially when you don’t call the forestry department to forewarn them.

  The first indication we had that things were no longer under control was when Dad ran into the house frantically to get our help. As it turned out, the pasture was ablaze, and the fire was moving rapidly toward the woods. If it had reached the woods, it would have been devastating not only to us but to the families around us as well. All of us—Mom, my sisters, my brothers—struck out to help Dad contain the fire.

  The fire hadn’t yet reached the woods, but we all noticed that it had jumped into our neighbor’s pasture. The good thing was that our neighbor would no longer have a weed problem. Hopefully he would still have a house.

  For the next few hours, we used shovels to beat on the edges of the fire. All of us did, although Christy got out of working early. She had a piano audition that day but was worried about leaving us. We all insisted she go, however, and she focused well enough to earn a college scholarship. The rest of us followed in her footsteps, earning scholarships to college, and it’s pretty funny that it started that day, during the fire. Even Otis, our dog, was pawing at the flames. Finally, through what had to be God’s grace and our collective efforts, we won out.

  From that point on, Dad has always called the forestry department for a burn permit ahead of time for a number of good reasons, one of which no doubt is that he doesn’t have a bunch of kids on hand to help put out any more “controlled” burns. Afterward, Dad took us all inside and used a teachable moment to have a brief Bible study on James 3:1–12. With the smell of the fire still on our clothes, Dad got us glasses of water, sat us down, and picked up his Bible. “Just like a small spark can cause a big fire,” Dad said, “the smallest part of the body, the tongue, can cause great damage when we do not control it. A wrongly chosen word can hurt a reputation, alienate a friend, or break a heart,” he continued, and had us each name a word that could hurt someone. A memorable lesson.

  In general, all these activities—“controlled burns” and sports—served to toughen us up, usually because no matter what, we wouldn’t stop working or playing. Looking back, my injuries were numerous but much less serious than either Robby’s or Peter’s. I was
never as much of a daredevil. But whether we twisted an ankle or cut a chin (my brothers, my dad and I all have chin scars), the competition and winning was what mattered, so we played through everything. Anything not to quit.

  And just as the farm made us tough, it also helped make us smart. As we were growing up, it was the backdrop for much of the learning we did—starting when we were toddlers and continuing until we were packing our bags for college. From the moment I was born, homeschooling was our way of life.

  It’s funny how, because I enjoyed homeschooling so much, it seemed like such an obvious choice for our family, but back when my parents first did it, it was far from common. My parents made the decision to homeschool their children long before I came into this world. It happened at some point after my older sister, Christy, was born, but before she’d started school. Dad was seeking direction and was struck by this passage in Deuteronomy 6:4–7:

  Hear, O Israel! The LORD is our God, the LORD is one!

  You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.

  These words, which I am commanding you today, shall be on your heart.

  You shall teach them diligently to your sons and shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise up.

  After reading and studying that passage, he knew he wanted us to homeschool. That way, they could focus on the curriculum and character lessons that they thought were most important, while emphasizing the best teachings for their children on a daily basis.

  Mom thought he was crazy, but she’d gotten used to his ability to follow wild ideas to some logical conclusion—regardless of what the crowd thought. It was the early 1980s, and she didn’t know anyone who was homeschooling. She didn’t know if it would be a good idea for her or for our family in general. In fact, people told her that her children would never be able to play sports or even go to college if she homeschooled. So they began to pray specifically about it: Dad for guidance, wisdom, and clarity on the direction God wanted them to go on this subject, and Mom that God would take the idea out of Dad’s mind if it really wasn’t the right decision for them as a family.

  Ultimately, they both felt led to teach their children at home, which at first proved to be a struggle for Mom. Not only was the bulk of the responsibilities for homeschooling assumed by her, but at that time there weren’t the support structures and resources for homeschooling that are available today. In fact, in researching the materials to use that would be appropriate, a number of times she would call publishers or educational-resource providers in the hope of getting the proper materials. When the companies realized that Mom was interested in using their materials to homeschool, they refused to sell them to her.

  Anyhow, Mom was determined to do it right and in the best way possible for us, and she stuck with it, tracking down materials or creating them herself. Her persistence turned out to be a wonderful blessing for all of us, not just because of the quality education we received, but also because of the flexibility that it afforded us.

  Even though I was young, I understood and appreciated the flexibility that homeschooling provided. My parents were able to design the structure, schedule, and content however they wanted. During the sports seasons, they could shift the bulk of the workload to earlier parts of the day so that we didn’t have a conflict with any afternoon or evening practices, games, or other activities. If they had to, they could also move studies to a different day altogether.

  The flexibility with travel and sports was convenient, but the real success of homeschooling came from the fact that we were actually learning. Mom set the curriculum, and she could tailor her teaching to the needs of each of us. She used games or whatever methods were necessary to reach us and get the lessons across—a freedom she took full advantage of. In our house, school could be happening at any moment—even at meals—so you always had to be prepared. She’d put different placemats at various times at our places around the table—United States presidents, the periodic-elements table, state and world capitals—and we would be challenged to learn everything on our placemat before the others could. Everything with us always had to be a race or a competition; Mom knew that and used it to enhance our learning process. We even had manners contests.

  Of course, as my parents would eventually find out, those placemats gave a decided advantage to Peter and to my sisters, Christy and Katie. My dad had long known that he was dyslexic, but it still took a while before my parents recognized that Robby, too, had dyslexia. By the time I came along, it didn’t take them long to spot it in me as well. The fact that I was still struggling with reading when I turned seven was probably a pretty good clue that something in my head was working differently and that I had dyslexia.

  Simply put, my brain processes things differently than most people. It’s the same for my dad and Robby. All three of us are kinesthetic (or tactile) learners, meaning that we learn best by doing. My most effective learning style is not particularly visual, so I don’t ordinarily retain as much simply from reading about something. I’ve heard others describe the feeling as reading when they’re tired and looking back at a page, knowing all the individual words and yet not being sure what the page was about. That often happens to me in the normal course of reading anything, whether I’m tired or not. Therefore, I learned to use other ways to supplement my reading to make sure I learned all that I should.

  Mom was always great with it. She had seen how things like this could stigmatize children and adults—into feeling that somehow they were less than, or not as smart or capable as, others. She had seen it in society, in schools, and in other settings, and she was determined that this would not be the case for her children. She explained to Robby and me that our dad has great intelligence as measured through his IQ score which is off the charts, but he just has to learn in a different manner. Through Mom, we learned and believed that it had nothing to do with intelligence, but was just the way our minds processed the information before us.

  She helped me realize that dyslexia wasn’t a disability, just a difference. My learning skills and information-processing abilities mean that I’m predisposed to learning much more quickly from “walk throughs,” which football coaches love to have anyway, where the players literally walk through the plays they will want to execute during the game, and walk through them at a slower speed than actual live-game or practice situations.

  Dealing with our dyslexia with wisdom, Mom not only affirmed that we were wonderful creations of God, with our God-given intelligence and abilities, but she gave us the confidence to learn as well. When subjects came more quickly to me, we could breeze through them, but if they were more of a struggle, we would slow down to focus on them. It was the same with each of my siblings—we were each able to discover alternate and better ways to learn, ways that were unique to us as students.

  My mom would read articles to us from the newspaper, or have us read them ourselves as we got older, and then we would identify and discuss the character issues in them. We could always find something to talk about in most every article. As we ate breakfast together as a family, we would read through Psalms and Proverbs. Both of my parents were not just casually interested in our memorizing a large number of Bible verses; they required it. To help us, Mom would put the verses to music in songs that she had made up. Memorizing our verses paid off in a number of ways. One which was very important to us was that we knew we couldn’t play sports or watch our favorite Saturday-night program, MacGyver—we all loved MacGyver, because it was the only Saturday-night program in English that we got in the Philippines—until we had successfully recited our five verses for the week. And it never seemed to fail that there was usually some frantic Saturday-afternoon studying going on in our house as the time for MacGyver crept closer.

  Another thing that I think homeschooling helped me with was that we all learned how to talk to adults at a much earlier age than some of our friends. Or at least i
t seemed that way to me. Regardless, the ability we acquired in being able to talk with and be around adults has benefitted me greatly. Somewhere in that homeschooling process and travels I developed a comfort level in being able to talk to adults, to properly and politely address them, and to interact with them in so many different settings. I think that’s because my parents made sure we were always included in most things they were involved in and around older adults. We weren’t just surrounded by kids like ourselves all day who were just speaking at our own level of maturity and content. We were challenged to grow in being able to build and have relationships with others—of all ages.

  Don’t get me wrong. It was still school, albeit with really small classes: one teacher, one student. My mom gave us grades for every class. She was tough with the amount of work she gave us, but at the end of the day, she was a pretty easy grader, because she was always trying to encourage us. She did insist that we always take year-end tests, however, because she wanted an outside assessment of how we were doing. Also, she and my dad began to suspect I might have a chance at a college scholarship, so they wanted to make sure we all were exposed to testing.

  People say you’ll miss out on things by being homeschooled, like the prom and other traditional activities that you experience in an institutional school setting. The truth was that we were always so active in sports at various schools that we usually got invited to other activities like proms or other dances and really didn’t miss out on the opportunity to participate in any of that if we chose to. Of course, there were things that, due to homeschooling, I probably missed out on. At times I wondered if there were friendships with other kids my age that I wasn’t experiencing. Ultimately, though, being very active in sports and church helped a lot with that, since we made many friends through those outlets.