Life Without Limbs, Existence Without Limits
The Awe-inspiring Life Story of Nick Vujičić
“When we pray for a miracle, sometimes, it doesn’t come true. But we can still be a miracle for someone else. If God can use a man without arms and legs to be His hands and feet, then He will certainly use any willing heart.”
Cautionary advice: This post mentions Christian doctrine, but it is not meant to alienate people practicing other belief systems (including atheism). It is not an attempt to preach, but a vehicle to inform and promote awareness of other people’s struggles, their successful attempts to overcome them, and how we can learn from the methods they used.
Our objective is to show how a positive outlook, willpower, strength of character, and faith can indeed move mountains.
Anyone can be forgiven if they step back in shock when they first see Nick Vujičić at one of his seminars. At first glance, you see only a head, neck, and clothed torso on a table. Nothing else. You do a double-take, but you realize your eyes are not deceiving you. A very short person, 3.3 feet tall, without arms and legs, is dominating the stage. It’s no camera trick.
And then he speaks. Once you hear what he has to say, your life will never be the same again.
Who Is Nick Vujičić?
He is a Serbian-Australian motivational speaker, author, and evangelist born without arms and legs. He has tetra-amelia syndrome (aka tetraphocomelia), a rare genetic disorder marked by the absence of all four limbs.
His left foot, though deformed, has two toes that allow him some mobility to perform activities of daily living. These toes were fused at birth, but he underwent surgery to have them separated.
He uses this two-toed foot to move around, pick up objects, brush his teeth, shave, comb his hair, get a drink, turn book pages, answer the phone, drive his electric wheelchair, and operate a computer. He can do the peace sign with two toes and type 53 words per minute with one using a “heel-and-toe” method he invented.
Such was his astounding adaptability to his medical condition that he has taught himself to engage in activities beyond his regular routine, like swimming (also with a shark), golf, throwing tennis balls, fishing, painting, playing drums, driving a car, skydiving, and writing books.
In the early days, however, his childhood was wrought with physical, mental, and emotional challenges brought about by his disability. According to his biopic, his own mom initially rejected him, refusing to see or hold him after he was born. Both parents eventually accepted their son and acknowledged that God has a plan for him.
Incredibly, he was able to overcome this familial rebuff, bullying, and suicide attempts to become one of the industry’s most inspirational speakers. Since age 19, he has been traveling around the world, advising many sectors of society on how to cope with disability and rise above adversity.
His audience is diverse, from students and educators to entrepreneurs and business moguls to church congregations to prison inmates. Millions have rediscovered hope, purpose, and the determination to overcome life challenges through his motivational seminars and powerful coaching.
Despite his disability, he has achieved more than most people accomplish in a lifetime. When you see and hear him during one of his talks, you will know what we mean.
To get a better understanding of Vujičić’s life and challenges, check out these videos:
Many more videos and articles about him are available online. If you’re interested in knowing more, Google his interviews with Oprah’s LifeClass, 60 Minutes Australia, CBS Sunday Morning, USA Today, the BBC, CNN, People Magazine, ABC News, The Glenn Beck Program, The Learning Channel, and LA Stories.
His Darkest Days
During his TEDx (Technology, Education, Design) talk on overcoming hopelessness, he recounted his bout with depression. From the ages of six to 10, he underwent a dark period of despair, hopelessness, and purposelessness. He used to ask, “Why did this happen to me?”
For most of his childhood, he struggled with depression borne out of how others perceived his appearance and the bullying that came with peer ignorance.
He attempted suicide twice, at ages 8 and 10, due to bullying at school, because he felt he was a burden to his parents, and since there seemed nothing to look forward to. He tried to drown himself in six inches of water in his bathtub.
But he realized that if he went through with it, he would leave a burden for his parents greater than the one they were already carrying. He recalled, “There was one thing more burdensome than having a child without limbs. It was having a child without limbs who gives up. I also imagined my parents and brother crying at my grave. That one thought saved me.”
Another critical event that influenced his decision to continue living was when his mom showed him a newspaper clip about a man with a devastating disability. Vujičić realized he wasn’t alone in his suffering. It was then that he started accepting his condition and became thankful for what he had.
He discerned that even the worst parts of his life could be turned into good—even more special. Once he acknowledged that his life story inspired many people, he decided to become a speaker.
The Emergent Motivational Speaker
A janitor at his school paved the way for this to happen by encouraging the teen to speak at schools. He told him that one day, he was going to be a speaker. True to his calling, at age 17, Vujičić addressed 300 sophomores at his high school, then followed this up with additional talks addressing his prayer group.
In 2005, he launched his non-profit ministry, Life Without Limbs, in Agoura Hills, California. Through it, he shares his experience as a person with disabilities and how he triumphed over the obstacles that came with it. Thus began his career as a motivational speaker. He says it’s the greatest drug he’s ever found in his life. He is now the top three speaker in some countries.
His speaking engagements prompted him to travel to 74 countries. His speeches have reached 10 governments, more than 700 million people on TV, and 2 billion more online. He met billionaires, captains of industry (Virgin boss Richard Branson), world leaders—including 21 presidents (Bill Clinton), and spiritual greats (the Dalai Lama).
His chosen path comes with its own tribulations—he has had three death threats for preaching Christianity in countries where practicing it is illegal. But this has not stopped him. His speeches continue to help people around the globe find hope and purpose, and even changed the trajectory of many lives.
His Accomplishments
He was the first special needs child to join Australia’s mainstream education system. At age 21, he graduated from Griffith University with a Bachelor of Commerce degree with a double major in accountancy and financial planning.
In 2005, he released his autobiography on DVD, Life’s Greater Purpose, which relays how he managed his disability while growing up. He has appeared in movies, released a single and a music video, and regularly produces inspirational DVDs.
His first book, Life Without Limits: Inspiration for a Ridiculously Good Life, was published by Random House in 2010 and translated into 40 languages. It was a bestseller. Even without marketing, it sold over a million copies. He has since written six other books all aimed at inspiring youth. He’s writing a new one on attitude and how to exceed expectations and limits.
He also ventured into radio to expand his strategy of spreading hope and Christ’s message.
He received many awards, including:
Australian Young Citizen Award (1990)
Young Australian of the Year Award (2005)
Best Actor in a Short Film award for his role in The Butterfly Circus (2010)
The Link Between Parental Encouragement and the Instillation of Hope
Vujičić was born in Melbourne (in Victoria, Australia) in 1982 to a devout Serbian Orthodox immigrant family. His parents, Borislav (Boris) and Dušanka (Dushka), met while in refugee camps in Australia after having fled the former Yugoslavia in the 1960s because of religious oppression. (His grandfathers were jailed and tortured for their faith.)
Vujičić and his younger siblings, Aaron and Michelle, grew up with their grandparents because both their parents worked. Their mom was a nurse at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne. Their dad worked three jobs, one in business management. Despite this arrangement, their parents, active church parishioners, imbued values that stayed with them through adulthood.
Vujičić stresses the importance of parenting in early childhood and its significance in building a child’s confidence and overcoming hopelessness. His parents kept reminding him that even with his disability, he can still help others. As his parents grew up in poverty, they urged him and his siblings to give money to the poor.
Typical of Serbian parents, they did not coddle him, giving him tough love instead. They paid young Nick $2 (Australian) per week to vacuum the floors of their house. He managed this with his shoulder and chin. One may think his parents are cold-hearted and brutal, but he claimed this activity taught him goal setting and gratitude, which proved useful later in life.
To prepare him for an uncertain future, his parents told him when he was six: “You need to be a millionaire to survive. Mom and dad can’t help you (indefinitely). You need to start a business in accounting and financial planning, and get employees. They’re going to be your hands and feet.”
At the same time, they were also supportive and encouraging: “They told me I was unique and beautiful the way I was and not to worry about what other people said about me.”
They told him they didn’t know why he was born that way, but he has a choice: to be angry for what he doesn’t have, or be thankful for what he has. “That was the first thing I had to decide for myself, especially in the early years of school,” he recalled.
What they imparted to him is true for everyone: “Do your best with what you have. You don’t know what you can achieve until you try it. Keep going and don’t give up.”
Miracles Do Happen
When he was a child, Vujičić begged God to give him arms and legs. He even kept a pair of shoes in a cabinet in case his prayer was answered. But he never got that miracle.
Many years later, though, God gave him a different one. When he was 19, doctors found syrinxes (fluid-filled cysts) in his spinal cord, which they claimed may cause his spine to disintegrate.
MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) scans showed three of these in his spine, which doctors predicted may paralyze him from age 45 if left untreated. They recommended putting in metal rods to support his spine, plus periodic MRI scans. Vujičić refused both the surgery and the radiology monitoring. He chose to leave it to God.
Ten years later, he was forced to undergo another MRI scan because of back pain. To his doctors’ surprise, the scan showed that one syrinx had disappeared. Two years later, a third scan showed the last two had disappeared. Medical professionals couldn’t explain why.
This was his miracle, but he has also witnessed many others that happened to people he met during his travels. They include vision-impaired people regaining their sight, the hearing-impaired having their senses restored, mobility-challenged people walking, crooked backs becoming straight, and diseased skin peeling off bodies within 24 hours.
One Just Like Him
As a child, Vujičić prayed for God to let him meet others who looked like him, so he could at least have consolation in company and solidarity. For the next 13 years, he did not.
But when he was 24, he found another individual with no arms and legs: Daniel Martinez, a 19-month-old in California. He knew that the baby was going to encounter the same challenges he did, so he counseled the child’s family to prepare them for the ordeals to come. He even invited the father to bring his son on stage during one of his talks. Many in the audience wept.
It was a materialization of his cognizance that “if you don’t get a miracle, you can still be a miracle for someone else.”
Vujičić said afterward that even if God did not answer his plea for arms and legs, he realized that “Beautiful things can come from your broken pieces when you give them a chance. I don’t need arms and legs because I have joy, the truth, and freedom.”
How He Dealt With Bullies
Vujičić relayed in his podcast interview with Lewis Howes that when he was 12, a woman told him that he may be a reincarnation of someone who is being punished for something he/she had done in a previous life and that he was just paying for his sins.
“But don’t worry,” she consoled him. “In your next life, you may come back as a butterfly.” But he thought, “This woman doesn’t know how many butterflies I squashed with my wheelchair.”
Cruel people taunted Vujičić when he was younger, saying nobody was going to love him and that he would never get married, much less have children. They jeered: “How can you live a normal life? What kind of father will you be when you can’t even pick up your kids when they’re crying? Just give up.”
In answer to his detractor’s barb: “You can’t even hold your wife’s hand,” he replied, “I don’t need hands to hold her hand. I only want to hold her heart.”
In solidarity with Vujičić to address another bullying question: “How are you going to hug your kids when you don’t have arms?”… many teens (who attended his seminars) folded their arms behind their backs and hugged him with their necks… proving that anything is possible.
Vujičić proved his bullies wrong. He is now married with two sons and twin daughters, all born without his disorder. He met his Japanese-Mexican wife, Kanae Miyahara, at his motivational event in McKinney, Texas, in 2008. They got married in 2012. The family lives in Southern California.
Because of his childhood experiences, Vujičić is an anti-bullying advocate. He has partnered with several governments’ education sectors for speaking engagements with students. In 2007, he created a Social Emotional Learning curriculum called “Attitude Is Altitude,” in which he teaches students positive change through secular motivational speaking.
What Does True Love Look Like?
Vujičić was already slightly famous when he met Miyahara. Shortly after, he lost all his money in some bad investments. He delayed informing her about his misfortune out of embarrassment and worry about losing her. But when he finally did, she remained unfazed, supported him, and told him they would solve the problem together. This proved she wasn’t “in it for the money.” It was then he knew she was the one.
From Miyahara’s viewpoint, she had previous relationships with men who failed to champion her cause. “I need someone to defend me,” she told Vujičić.
He replied without hesitation: “I will definitely fight for you.” She knew then and there that he was going to be her husband.
Vujičić in Prison
Vujičić has spoken to inmates in many prisons. He usually speaks to a gathering of inmates in an auditorium but isn’t allowed contact with people on death row or sections housing the most dangerous criminals for safety reasons.
But in one maximum-security prison, he asked the warden to make an exception. So he was allowed into a restricted wing where he delivered his speech in front of locked doors, each with a barred window.
The Man from Death Row
Despite warnings about potential dangers, he asked to be brought up to one of the windows. A hand shot out of the bars, grabbed him by the collar, and dragged him to the door until he was face-to-face with the resident inside. Vujičić thought he was going to get hurt.
Instead, the inmate told him,
“I may be behind bars while the warden and the guards get to go home to their families every day. But are they really free? I enjoy greater freedom than them because I have accepted the Lord. I may be stuck here all my life, but I am at peace.”
Vujičić agreed with him and told the rest of his inmates: “The real prison is not inside these walls but within ourselves. You have to learn to forgive yourself, knowing that there’s nothing that can come between you and God’s love—not even sin.”
“Once you remove the negativity inside you, discover your purpose in life, and proceed to fulfill this purpose, you will be free. Mark Twain said: ‘The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why’.”
At first, Vujičić’s speech at Telford State Prison seemed like his standard talk discussing overcoming life challenges, but toward the end, when he invited inmates to kneel at the foot of the stage to affirm their willingness to repent and be forgiven—and so he could pray over them—it was incredible how many responded to his call.
We urge you to watch the video even if you’re not a Christian, if only to witness the inexplicable proof of Vujičić’s ability to uplift the spirit and his remarkable power of persuasion.
What Does True Forgiveness Look Like?
Vujičić said, “If I do not forgive, I really have no arms or legs. Why add another disability?”
Howes agreed, referring to a quote attributed to Buddha: “Holding on to anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.”
Vujičić presented this phenomenal example of genuine forgiveness:
At a time when the human trafficking headcount in India was in the 120 million range, Vujičić spoke to 650 of its teenage victims. They were either kidnapped or sold by their parents to pimps for US $700 each when they were 10 years old and subsequently sold as sex slaves in Mumbai. To add insult to injury, their captors also abused them.
Vujičić encouraged this particular audience to attend a “Jesus rehabilitation camp” for 18 months. Afterward, the attendees got jobs and rebuilt their lives. Then, they went back to the people who abused them, washed their feet (to emulate Jesus’s demonstration of humility by washing his apostles’ feet), and forgave them.
This mind-boggling, stupefying gesture unnerved the abusers, reducing them to tears. Unknown to them, their former victims each saved US $700 to buy back one slave, freeing her to attend rehab and reclaim her dignity.
Can God forgive someone who caused irreparable damage?
Vujičić wasn’t finished with the Mumbai story. Reiterating his claim that “Not even sin can separate us from the love of God,” he pitched this clincher:
During his visit at the brothels, Vujičić met this woman who looked 100 years old whose illness rendered her hunchbacked and crippled. His Indian translator said she had been that way for many years and had never been able to walk nor move on her own.
After catching Vujičić counseling this woman and encouraging her to walk, her sister shooed him away. Persistent, he came back, prayed over the elderly woman, and massaged her withered feet. After some time, with her sister witnessing the event, the old woman was able to walk without assistance.
The translator was immensely upset by the miraculous healing of the old woman. How can God cure her when she was the most evil woman he had ever known? Vujičić asked what she had done to earn this title.
The rep said that 45 years ago, she bought 10 acres of land—the same plot where the brothels were built. She recruited the pimps, madams, and kidnappers. She came up with the ploy of tricking parents into selling their daughters. She was the founder of human trafficking in Mumbai responsible for approximately 30,000 sex slaves.
And God still healed her!
She accepted Jesus into her life after being healed. After three years, human trafficking was shut down completely on that 10-acre block in Mumbai.
His Thoughts on Depression
Vujičić quoted statistics in his TEDx talk. He said that a million people commit suicide every year or one suicide occurs every 40 seconds. (Statistics change periodically and are different per region.)
But does this matter to the depressed person? When he is desolate, he doesn’t care what happens to the rest of the world. It doesn’t matter if his troubles seem shallow to others; only his problems are important. This internal stubborn focus is what makes it difficult to get out of any rut.
This is why it is important to “go beyond the self.” No doubt this is difficult to do, as attested by the young suicidal Vujičić. But as we have seen, with everything that has transpired during his lifetime, things do get better… even if it takes years. He urges, “Transform obstacles into opportunities.”
Why do people get depressed?
Many people are miserable because they don’t know what to live or die for. When we feel like we don’t have enough love and hope, we lose the strength to live.
But challenges prompt us to ask these fundamental questions:
“Who are we?”
“Why is this happening to us?”
“Why are we here?”
When we finally realize why we do what we do, this purpose gives us the willpower to override all limitations and fear. “Fear is the greatest disability of all,” he said.
“We’ve been through what we’ve been through to become who we are today. So we have to keep on going; conquer the next barrier. No one has it all together, but if we can get ahead of that curve, get rid of negativity… ” we can weather the fiercest of storms.
How to get out of depression:
1) Talk to a trusted person.
2) Help others without expecting gratitude or asking for something in return.
3) Be thankful for what you have and that whatever could have gone worse did not happen. “Gratitude instigates purposefulness.”
He said the happiest people are:
1) Those who have unchained themselves from past hurts
2) Those who intentionally practice an attitude of gratitude
Final Thoughts
There are many ways to distract yourself from problems, but the best one is to help others. Reach out to those less fortunate than you. This is what Nick Vujičić has been doing most of his life despite his disability.
Whenever you feel your life is difficult and find yourself in the throes of self-pity, think of what he has to go through every day. He challenges us: “If this is what I’ve been able to do without arms and legs, what can you do? What’s your excuse?”
Remember his message of hope and perseverance: “Words can only do so much. Hugs can do much more than words. But when hugs can’t do anything, that’s where faith kicks in. Faith is believing in something you do not see.”
We sincerely hope our retelling of his life story will help readers struggling with depression or other challenges to reconstruct the shattered fragments of their lives, just like those exceptional slaves once did. If Vujičić and they were able to do it, so can anyone.
Resources:
National Organization for Rare Disorders: Tetra-amelia syndrome
Lewis Howes’s School of Greatness
TEDx Talks Serbia
Vujičić’s website and motivational videos
Photo Credits:
Main—Hector Dupont (under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 international license)
Supplementary—Christliches Medienmagazin pro (under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 generic license)
Bird on barbed wire—Srinivas Reddy
Girl surrounded by barbed wire—Janrye
Bullies—Gerd Altmann
Butterfly Circus—Vlad Vasnetsov
Red lighted building—Vadim Kaipov
Jubilation in silhouette—Jill Wellington
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