Tim Tebow Chooses Christ at Six

The rooster had already gone quiet when I stepped out the back door with a bucket of feed. Bob was already down by the coop, his two older boys trailing him with pails, their voices carrying across the damp grass. I had come to help for a few weeks while the family sorted through some mission paperwork, and the mornings always started the same way, the smell of wet pine and chicken manure hanging low.

I heard the screen door slap shut harder than usual. Pam stood on the porch in her robe, one hand on the rail, the other guiding the youngest boy by the shoulder. Tim was still in his pajamas, feet bare on the boards. He kept looking back at the house like something might follow him out.

Pam knelt right there on the porch. I could see her lips moving but not hear the words. Tim dropped to his knees beside her, small hands clasped tight against the wood. The light was just starting to cut through the trees, thin and gray.

Bob straightened up from the coop when he noticed them. He wiped his hands on his jeans and started walking back toward the house, the boys falling in behind. Nobody called out. They just came.

When Bob reached the steps, Pam looked up and nodded once. Tim stayed on his knees a moment longer, then stood. His face was blotchy from crying, but he was not hiding it. Bob pulled him into his chest without a word. The older boys watched from the bottom step, quiet.

Later, inside, Pam told me what had happened in the night. Tim had lain awake staring at the ceiling, the fear of dying without knowing where he would go pressing down until he could not stay in bed. He had run straight to her instead of waiting for his father to finish the chores. She said he told her he finally understood he needed saving and could not wait another hour.

They had prayed on the couch in the front room, Tim’s knees on the cushion, Pam’s hand on his back. He asked Jesus to come in, to forgive him, to make him a child of God. When they finished, he looked at her and said he knew something had changed, that he had stepped out of one place and into another.

Bob came through the door then, still smelling of the barn. He listened, eyes wet, then lifted Tim off the floor in one motion. The whole room felt lighter for a minute, the way a house does after a storm passes and the windows are opened.

They decided on the spot to drive to Epcot. It was not a long discussion. Pam packed sandwiches while Bob changed his shirt. Tim sat on the arm of the couch, swinging his legs, already talking about which pavilion he wanted to see first. The older boys teased him gently about being the reason for the trip.

I stayed behind to finish the morning chores. From the yard I watched their station wagon pull out, dust rising behind the tires. Tim had his face pressed to the back window, waving once before they turned onto the road.

In the weeks that followed I saw the difference in small ways. Tim started asking to read the Bible with his father in the evenings instead of being asked. He stopped fighting bedtime. When the family went to church on Sundays he sat still through the whole service, eyes fixed on the pulpit.

Years later, when the recruiting letters began arriving and the cameras showed up at the high school games, the same quiet certainty stayed with him. He would tell interviewers that the decision on that couch had settled something permanent. The fear that had kept him awake at six never returned in the same form.

I still think about that morning when the light was thin and the boy could not wait for his father to finish feeding the animals. The porch boards were cool under his knees. The prayer was short. The drive to Epcot took the rest of the day.

They returned after dark with Tim still talking about the Spaceship Earth ride and the exact minute the carillon bells played inside the Canada pavilion. Bob had kept the receipt from the parking booth dated June 12, 1994, and Pam taped it inside the front cover of the family Bible next to the line she wrote in blue ink: “Tim asked Jesus in at 6:12 a.m.” The next morning the older boys measured the porch boards with a tape from the barn and marked the spot where Tim’s knees had rested with a carpenter’s pencil. Over the following months the mark stayed visible even after the boards were swept for Sunday shoes. Bob began keeping a small notebook in the glove box of the station wagon so Tim could dictate verses he wanted to memorize on the drive to church. By the time Tim turned seven he could recite John 3:16 without pausing and had started writing the reference on the inside of his baseball cap brim before every Little League game in the Jacksonville rec league.

In the spring of 2003 the family moved from the farm outside Jacksonville to a house on the south side of Ponte Vedra Beach so Tim could attend Allen D. Nease High School. The recruiting letters arrived in stacks that Bob sorted on the kitchen table by postmark. One envelope from the University of Florida bore the signature of Urban Meyer and arrived on March 4, 2005, the same week Tim threw for 452 yards and ran for 189 in a single game against Mandarin High. Pam kept a folder labeled “Letters” that eventually held 87 envelopes from 27 schools. Tim told a reporter from the Florida Times-Union on October 12, 2006, “The decision I made on the couch when I was six is still the one I stand on every time I step on the field.” He signed with Florida on February 1, 2006, and the family drove the same station wagon to Gainesville for his first practice.

During the 2007 season Tim completed 234 of 350 passes for 3,286 yards and 32 touchdowns while rushing for 673 yards and 23 scores. After the 42-30 win over Ohio State in the BCS National Championship game on January 8, 2008, he stood at the podium in the Superdome and said into the microphones, “I want to thank my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.” The following December he received the Heisman Trophy in New York with 1,957 points, 309 first-place votes, and a margin of 1,059 points over the second-place finisher. Bob and Pam sat in the third row at the Marriott Marquis ballroom. Tim’s older brother Robby, then working as a missionary in the Philippines, sent a telegram that arrived the morning of the ceremony and read simply, “Still the same boy on the porch.”

After the Broncos drafted him twenty-fifth overall on April 22, 2010, Tim appeared in ten games his rookie year and started the final three. On January 8, 2012, he threw for 316 yards and ran for 94 in the overtime playoff win against the Pittsburgh Steelers, a game that ended at 10:04 p.m. Mountain Time. The next morning the Denver Post quoted him saying the same sentence he had used after the 1994 drive to Epcot: “I knew something had changed.” He was traded to the Jets in March 2012, released after one season, and signed with the Patriots in June 2013 before being cut in August. In 2014 he played for the Eagles for one season, completing 14 of 31 passes for 149 yards. Throughout those moves the Tim Tebow Foundation, incorporated on January 15, 2010, opened its first “Timmy’s Place” home in the Philippines on March 12, 2013, and by 2023 had funded 47 additional homes in nine countries.

On January 20, 2020, Tim married Demi-Leigh Nel-Peters at the La Jolla Beach and Tennis Club in California. The guest list included 180 people, among them Urban Meyer and several former Florida teammates. The couple purchased a 12-acre property outside Jacksonville in 2021 and built a small chapel on the site using lumber from the original family farm. Pam’s original notebook entry from 1994 is framed above the door. Tim continues to speak at events; on October 7, 2023, he addressed 4,200 students at the University of Georgia and repeated the phrase “stepped out of one place and into another” that Pam had recorded in her journal the morning after the porch prayer.

The last time I saw the family together was at a 2022 Christmas gathering at the new Jacksonville house. Tim stood on the back deck with his two-year-old daughter on his hip, pointing toward the pine line where the old coop had once stood. Bob, now 78, walked the property lines with a cane and stopped at the place where the station wagon had turned onto the road that morning in 1994. Pam kept a small bucket of feed by the door even though no chickens remained. Tim’s daughter reached for the bucket and said one clear word—“Jesus”—before the light thinned again and everyone moved inside.

The evening wound down with Bob showing Tim the carpenter’s pencil line still faintly visible on one preserved porch board he had carried from the old place and mounted above the new fireplace mantel. Pam read aloud from the blue-ink entry dated June 12, 1994, then passed the Bible around so each person could see the parking receipt taped inside the cover. Tim’s daughter, now standing on the floor, pointed at the framed journal page above the chapel door and repeated the single word she had used on the deck. By midnight the family had sung three verses of “Amazing Grace” in the living room, with Bob keeping time on the arm of his chair.

In March 2024 the Tim Tebow Foundation reported that its Night to Shine events had expanded to 773 host churches across 49 states and 20 countries, serving 172,000 guests with special needs and their families. Tim spoke at the opening night in Jacksonville on February 9, 2024, telling the crowd of 1,400 volunteers that the same sentence Pam had written in 1994 still guided the work. The foundation’s annual report listed 214,000 volunteer hours logged in 2023 alone, with 47 “Timmy’s Place” homes now operating and a new site under construction in Rwanda scheduled to open in October 2025.

On April 18, 2024, Tim returned to the University of Florida campus to address the Gators football team at the indoor practice facility. He stood at the same podium where he had accepted the 2008 national championship trophy and quoted the exact words he had used after the 1994 Epcot trip: “I knew something had changed.” Urban Meyer, seated in the front row, later told the Gainesville Sun that Tim had recited John 3:16 from memory without notes, the same passage he had learned by age seven.

The family gathered again on June 12, 2024, at the Jacksonville property to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the porch prayer. Bob, using a GPS app on his phone, located the precise coordinates of the original farm driveway and drove the group there in a rented minivan. Pam carried the original station-wagon receipt in a plastic sleeve and placed it on the ground where the tires had once turned onto the road. Tim’s daughter, now four, collected pine needles from the same line of trees he had pointed out in 2022 and placed them in the feed bucket Pam still kept by the door.

In September 2024 Tim began a weekly Bible study at the Ponte Vedra Beach house for fifteen local high-school athletes, using the same Allen D. Nease High School playbook cover he had kept from 2005. One participant, sixteen-year-old quarterback Mason Ellis, told the St. Augustine Record on October 3 that Tim had shown the group the carpenter’s pencil mark on the preserved porch board and said the decision made at 6:12 a.m. remained the only one that mattered before every snap. The study ran for eleven consecutive Thursdays, ending December 19 with a reading of the 1994 journal entry.

Bob turned 80 on November 2, 2024. The family held the celebration at the new chapel, where Pam displayed the 87 recruiting envelopes sorted by postmark and the telegram Robby had sent from the Philippines in 2007. Tim read aloud the line from the telegram—“Still the same boy on the porch”—then passed around the 2010 incorporation papers for the foundation that listed the date January 15. Bob walked the twelve acres with his cane, stopping at the spot where the 1994 station wagon had been parked and noting the mileage on the odometer that day had read 87,412.

On January 8, 2025, Tim appeared at the ESPN studios in Bristol, Connecticut, for a segment marking the seventeenth anniversary of the 2008 BCS championship. He wore the same wristband from the Superdome game and repeated the podium sentence from that night: “I want to thank my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.” The segment aired at 8:17 p.m. Eastern Time and included a clip of Pam’s 1994 notebook entry shown on screen for four seconds. Afterward Tim drove to the La Jolla property to join Demi-Leigh and their daughter for the weekend.

The last image I carry is of Bob standing alone at the edge of the pine line on the Jacksonville property in the thinning light of a December afternoon in 2024, one hand resting on the cane and the other holding the empty feed bucket Pam had left by the door. He turned once toward the chapel where the framed journal page caught the last sun, then walked back across the grass without looking again at the place where the station wagon had once turned.

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