A BODY WITHOUT ARMS OR LEGS BUT NO LIMITS NO EXCUSES

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NICK VUJICIC

On December 4th, 1982, in Melbourne, Dušanka and Borislav Vujičić waited for their first child. He arrived with no arms, no legs, a single small foot with two fused toes the only limb his body had managed to grow. The condition, tetra-amelia syndrome, was so rare that the doctors in the room had nothing useful to tell them. His mother could not bring herself to hold him. His father left the room. It would take real, unhurried, imperfect time before either of them could look at their son and see a future instead of a tragedy.

By age ten, the bullying at school had compounded with a question Nick could not answer for himself; what was the point of a life like his. He decided to end it, and tried to drown himself in the bathtub. He stopped himself, not because the pain lifted, but because he thought of his parents, of what his absence would do to the two people who, however imperfectly, had never actually left him. He decided, in that moment, to find out what his life was for instead of ending it.

He started speaking at his school prayer group, a few sentences at first, about what it was like to live in his body and his faith. People listened in a way they had not before. He kept speaking, by twenty-one, he had earned a Bachelor of Commerce from Griffith University, double-majoring in accounting and financial planning, proof, to himself as much as anyone, that his mind had never been the limitation.

Nick did not overcome his limits, he kept living past the line where the world assumed they had stop him. He took the most private hour of his life, a ten-year-old alone in a bathtub deciding whether to keep going, and made it public, on purpose, over and over, to rooms full of strangers.

That choice is what gives his message its weight with people who will never share his particular circumstances. Depression, bullying, the conviction that you are a burden rather than a gift. Nick's specific story became a way for millions of people to talk about a feeling that has no visible shape at all.

He has never claimed his life is proof that faith or attitude erases hardship. He still cannot hug his own children the way other fathers do. What he has shown, consistently, for over two decades, is that a life can be entirely worth living without being whole in the way anyone expected.

"Don't let your eyes be focused on what you don't have. Be thankful for what you do have, and use it." The world did not change because Nick Vujicic gained something, it changed because he refused to wait for it.

365 men who changed the world.

Kamikun John, Author 366 days of wisdom.