Whither Tebow?

Not All Who Wander

So the question now is whether the future holds a place for Tim Tebow in the NFL.

Well my goodness they didn’t think he belonged there before Peyton Manning signed with the Broncos … so who cares what they say now?

When he was succeeding, they said he shouldn’t be. He just shouldn’t.

Why not?

He shouldn’t be succeeding because my … gosh! … just look at him! He shouldn’t be succeeding because he shouldn’t.

Perhaps you begin to see the problem with that reasoning.

Then they were bugged because he was proving them wrong.

Now what?

Deciding whether — or where — Tebow should play when you aren’t the one deciding is like asking if Google+ will topple Facebook. As if you could know.

Tebow will be fine.

And anyway, we don’t know.

Apropos of recent news — where will Peyton Manning sign? — I remember January, when the Colts fired their head coach, Jim Caldwell. The day before he was gone, as one report noted:

Things were so clouded Monday that Caldwell even met with former Rams coach Steve Spagnuolo about possibly becoming the Colts’ new defensive coordinator, and as late as Tuesday morning, the conventional wisdom was that Caldwell would stay.

Then things changed almost as suddenly as the Colts’ fortunes in 2011.

A day before he was fired, the coach met with someone to interview him for a job on his staff! In less than 24 hours, he was gone.

We just don’t know.

He never got real public support from either head coach John Fox or John Elway. These are the areas where support is routinely expressed … but not here.

They had a chance to build a team around the guy, and now another team will have that chance. The conventional wisdom says they will trade him.

Of course, conventional wisdom has been wrong before, and maybe Manning will train Tebow, instead of punch his ticket out.

If they do trade him, the new team will make it work.

Tebow’s a sinner saved by grace — yes — and knows his faith and football both come from God.

But he’s also an elite. He’s an awesome football player.

We may not like elitism … but we love excellence.

Elites.

Tim Tebow is one of them. He’s an elite. He’s in a place every day and a tougher place every week, and one that none of us, critics included, will ever see. He’s better than 1 percent of 1 percent of the world at this.

The oldest ugliest brokenest Major League Baseball journeyman utility infielder hitting .230 … the guy who might see a homerun once every 30 games … unless he’s watching his teammates when they’re up … who will never see the inside of Cooperstown unless he buys a ticket or they ask him to introduce someone who got voted in … is a better baseball player than any of us.

Let that sink in here.

Tebow’s good at football.

And he’s pretty good, period.

The more we know about Tim Tebow, the more we like him.

But even that — whether we like him or not — is of no ultimate concern.

Tebow’s New Testament namesake knew a little about pressure and derision.

And Tebow will get better and better.

This I am almost sure of.

And it will be OK.

This I do know.

He’ll be fine.

I recall C.S. Lewis writing somewhere, “If the Lord lets me keep writing, then blessed be He.  And if He does not — then blessed be He.” This was in the early 1960s, a few years before his death. The Lord, it appears, did not let him keep writing.

Blessed be He.

Note: This post originally appeared as a guest column for Inside the Pew, and is partly excerpted from my book, Tebow: Throwing Stones.

Recent

Subjective, Objective

The other day I wrote on a wing and a whim … and misremembering. Or as Prufrock put it, quoting Woman —   That is not it at all, That is not what I meant, at all. Nearly nothing I recalled happened in that way. Except of course the recalling. And a bit more. Wasn’t

Read More »

People do the Craziest Things

Adam — did he do what he did for love? Did he say, ‘I will join her; I can’t bear to be without her.’ — is that how it went down? He at after Eve; was it because he’d rather skulk around the earth a sojourner and pilgrim at the mercy of the people in that

Read More »

Time and Treasure

Saw an episode ages ago of one of the Twilight Zone reboots which, I’m pretty sure, starred Mark Hamill as this weird kid who collected toys. All this kitschy stuff from the ‘50s and grew up collecting them — and thus stayed weird and for the most part apparently lonely for his life entire. Of course

Read More »

Ensamples

Among the worst things about The Slap is how it has fed self-righteousness in all but the two participants, and they already had it or it wldn’t have happened. But there is Solzhenitsyn, again, with the line between good and evil that cuts through every human heart, and there is Dostoevsky, always, reminding us via

Read More »

Random

The Amazing Amazingness of Amazing Stuff

Amazing. Did it creep up on you as well? This overuse of the word “amazing” just sort of … appeared. Amazing. Here I was just a moment ago trying to read about the Dodgers, and Don Mattingly wanting more instant replay — they’d lost recently to the Brewers on a questionable call to end the

Read More »

Total Recall

Don’t stop me if you’ve heard this one … There was a woman who claimed to talk with God — not to Him, but with Him. The tale was well-told around town, in which there was also a priest. The priest one day after Mass asked to speak with the woman and when they’d settled

Read More »

Room Where It Happens

If the line between good and evil cuts through the human heart there’s gotta be some overlap. The lovely mesh seems so far to last oh … about forever and it occurred this morning it will never quite be clean this side of the fundy conception of the Jordan. Even Dr. Willard, averring as he

Read More »

Cursing With God

More battle scenes please Once teaching a high school American Literature class — and let me tell you, once is enough —a student he says, “I don’t understand The Red Badge of Courage.  It’s a war book, but there are hardly any battle scenes.  I don’t get it.” So we did a little Socratic dialogue, and

Read More »

Related

Trouble and Strife

Septic tank is Cockney rhyming slang for “Yank” which may suggest what trouble and strife is slang for. But it’s not fair of course, and good men, and most men some of the time, know she’s not only that. Upon noting once how, yes, “children are a bother,” Dallas Willard made the important philosophical distinction

Read More »

Never Get Out Of The Boat

So you’re on this boat. You’re near enough to land if you want some of that, but you don’t exactly want to leave the old life. The old life in this case is not the bad old days B.C. Those are way gone. In fact, they mayn’t even be optional for you anymore. Sorry. That’s

Read More »

Pieta

I don’t think next year will be so different from this year. Which after all was not so different from the one before. But I think you can be different from last year and I can. Which after all may be true for you as it was also for me.

Read More »