Tim Tebow reveals why doctors called him a 'tumor' and what his mom did about it
Former NFL quarterback and current minor league baseball player Tim Tebow recently detailed the powerful story of his birth.
Speaking to Pastor Louie Giglio at Passion 2018 (a conference for college students) in Atlanta earlier this month, Tebow revealed how medical complications made his mother’s pregnancy with him a stressful one, and also an incredible pro-life story.
After Giglio asked, “What made you into the person you are?” Tebow responded, “I was born in the Philippines to missionary parents and I have a special birth story.”
“The doctors said that I wasn’t even a baby,” he explained. “They said I was a tumor.
“There was a lot of craziness with my entire — with my mom’s pregnancy with me. … She decided to trust God and not what the doctors were saying,” Tebow said, hinting that doctors pushed his mom to have him aborted.
“Then I was born and it was a miracle. The placenta wasn’t attached the entire pregnancy. … I was malnourished, but I made up for it pretty quickly.”
Tebow moved on to talk about what an important influence his parents had on his life.
“I had the opportunity to have the most amazing mom and dad that loved me and brought me up in the church/mission field, and I’m so grateful for their impact,” he said.
This isn’t the first time Tebow has gone public with his birth story. Back in 2010 he appeared in a pro-life commercial with his mother Pam during the Super Bowl.
Later in the interview, Tebow talked about his famous Bible verse eye black, and how his decision to change the verse caused a mini crisis in the Florida Gators locker room.
“It was my junior year at Florida and it was 15 minutes before the third game of the season,” he said. “We were getting ready to play Tennessee … I was thinking, ‘I wonder if maybe I could put something under my eyes that can be encouraging or inspiring.’
“Then I thought of Philippians 4:13. That’s an awesome verse for a football player — ‘I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.’ So I put it under my eyes, and we were blessed to go out and win.”
Tebow stuck with the verse through the rest of the season until he reached the national championship game against Oklahoma and felt called to do something different.
When he told Florida coach Urban Meyer the day before the game that he was going to switch to John 3:16, he got a reaction he wasn’t expecting.
“What? What are you talking about? You can’t change the verse! Philippians 4:13 got us here!” Tebow quoted Meyer as saying.
But eventually the Heisman Trophy winner was able to convince his coach that everything would be OK, and the rest is history: Tebow threw two touchdown passes and ran for 109 yards as the Gators beat the Sooners 24-14.
“We were blessed to win the national championship, and two days afterward, I was eating dinner … with my mom, my dad, my aunt and Coach Meyer. And Coach Meyer gets a call and he’s like, ‘Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh. All right, bye.’ So intense. I was like, ‘Coach, what’s that all about?'”
Tebow said Meyer told him it was Florida’s PR guy.
“He said, ‘Timmy, he just told me that during the game, 94 million people Googled John 3:16.’ … I was just so humbled at how big the God that we serve really is,” Tebow said.
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