Nick Vujicic: ‘Life Without Limits’

“I’m
officially disabled, but I’m truly enabled because of my lack of limbs,”
Vujicic writes in Life Without Limits: Inspiration for a Ridiculously Good
Life.

Attributing
this positive attitude in spite of his physical limitations to his “beautiful
God,” he learned that “there’s a greater purpose for all things.” Still, it
took this son of an Australian preacher a while to get to that positive stance.
From 8 years old, “feeling like there was no hope and feeling like I was
becoming just a burden to my parents and not believing that I’d become
self-sufficient, employed, married, have a family,” Vujicic decided it would be
better if he would “just disappear.”

Believing
the lies that he was unloved and not good enough, he attempted suicide at age
10. “Three times in the bathtub I turned over and tried to drown myself,” he
said. “The first two times I rolled over, I thought I was doing a good thing by
relieving my parents of their biggest burden—which was me—but the third time I
realized that there was something worse than my parents having a son without
limbs, it was a son without limbs that gave up, so I couldn’t go through with
it, and I thank God for that because you don’t know what’s around the corner
until you actually go around the corner.”

Now,
with the help of three caregivers that rotate every 10 days, he can walk, swim,
surf, and with the help of his two-toed left foot, even type 42 words per
minute.

“With
every limitation, there are blessings that come with it—and that might be
offensive to somebody who’s dying of cancer, whose mum and dad just split up
and so on, and I never belittle anyone’s pain—but in my life, you will see the
examples again and again how we have a choice to really just concentrate on
what we do have and stop complaining about what we don’t have and live life to
the fullest, knowing that we have a true destiny and a true purpose [in] the
One who gives me peace,” he said.

At age
15, Vujicic came to a personal faith when he read John 9, the story of the man
born blind to give God glory in his life. “I just wanted to know that God knew.
That was the greatest and is the greatest comfort today, that God knows, He
knows your pain. He will not let you go through more than you can handle. If
you trust in Him and lean not upon your own understanding, He will direct your
paths. He will be with you till the end.”

Now
living in California, he is an internationally successful motivational speaker
and preacher, traveling to six continents, and has become wildly popular on
YouTube, with millions of views for videos showing him surfing, speaking or
simply brushing his teeth.

“That’s
the beautiful thing about having no arms, no legs, how God packaged this, that
we can cross over boundaries, build bridges and all that, but mainly it’s
because I know that I’m not alone,” he said. “I think fear of being alone is
the biggest disability of all. … You can be complete on the outside, but if
you’re broken on the inside, there’s no point.”

In Life
Without Limits, he offers advice on when to seek the guidance of others,
how to graciously ask for and accept assistance and how to know when it is
better to strike out on your own. Believing that “brokenness can be a good
thing,” Vujicic shows how he learned to accept what he could not control and
focus on what he could.

Click here to
purchase this book.