Shaken: Discovering Your True Identity in the Midst of Life’s Storms is by Tim Tebow, written with A. J. Gregory. WaterBrook published it in 2016 and it was a New York Times bestseller.
What the book is about
Tebow won the Heisman Trophy at Florida, had a genuinely improbable playoff run with the Denver Broncos, then was traded to the New York Jets and released after a single season. The book is written from the other side of that: what it is like to be publicly discarded from the thing you were best known for.
His argument is a single sustained point. Your identity cannot rest on what you do, because what you do can be taken from you by a phone call. It has to rest on whose you are. He is not making that point abstractly, which is why it carries.
Why it works better than it should
A book by a famous athlete about finding your identity in Christ could easily be thin. This one mostly is not, for two reasons.
First, Tebow writes about the failure rather than around it. He does not skip to the lesson. There is real detail about the rejection and the media scrutiny, and he does not present himself as having handled it gracefully throughout.
Second, a good part of the book is not about him at all. He spends significant time on people he has met through his foundation work, many of them facing far worse than a lost job, and he uses their stories rather than his own to make the harder points. That choice keeps the book from becoming a celebrity memoir.
Its limits
It is encouragement, not instruction. There is no framework here, no theology of suffering, and no serious engagement with the harder version of the question, which is what identity in Christ means when the loss is permanent and nothing improves. Tebow’s own story resolves; many do not.
The writing is also plainly co-authored and reads like inspirational trade non-fiction, because that is what it is.
Note on the group study
If you want to use this with a group, there is a separate product: a Shaken Bible Study with an accompanying DVD, sold apart from this book. The main book is written for reading rather than for structured group work, so buy the study if that is your intent, rather than expecting the book to do it.
Who it suits
Good for a man who has just lost something that defined him: a job, a role, a position, a status. Also good for a teenage or college-age reader, who will know who Tebow is and take it from him more readily than from a pastor.
Skip it if you want depth on suffering, or if celebrity-authored encouragement puts you off. This is a sincere and well-executed example of that category, not an exception to it.
Bottom line
An honest, readable book about being publicly cut and finding that your identity was never the job. Strongest when Tebow is talking about other people’s storms rather than his own.