I am constantly amazed of stories of real people overcoming impossible obstacles in their lives. There is one I want to share this week – knowing his full story for years – I am forever reading about him and continue to say “that is impossible.” Who am I referring to? His name is Nic Vujicic.
He was born on December 4, 1982, in Melbourne, Australia. The pregnancy was normal, Three ultrasounds showed no problems. But when Nicholas James Vujicic was born, he had no arms and no legs. The condition is called tetra-amelia syndrome, an extraordinarily rare disorder, with no medical explanation and no warning. There was nothing anyone could do.
For the longest time his own mother wouldn’t hold him. As he grew older, his classmates wouldn’t accept him. The world said he had no future. According to Nic’s own account, his mother and father left the hospital. His father was so shaken he became physically ill. For months, his parents struggled to accept what had happened to their firstborn child. But eventually, they did. They chose to raise him not as a child with a disability, but as a child with a future. They fought to enroll him in mainstream school when the law in their state initially barred children with physical disabilities from attending. As it turned out, Nic became one of the first students with his condition to be integrated into a regular classroom.
School was brutal. His classmates bullied him relentlessly. By the time he was eight years old, Nic had begun to wonder whether his life had any purpose at all. By age ten, he tried to end it once and for all by attempting to drown himself in the bathtub in his family’s home. But he stopped when he thought of his parents. He realized that his death would cause them more pain than his life ever had. Something in that moment shifted. Instead of giving up, he decided to keep going.
And then he started doing things no one believed were possible.
Nic was born with one partial foot that doctors later separated in surgery. He calls it his “chicken drumstick.” With that single foot, he taught himself to write, type forty-three words a minute on a computer, operate an electric wheelchair, comb his hair, brush his teeth, and answer the phone. He learned to swim. Then to surf. To skateboard. To play drums. To dive off a boat into the ocean. To skydive. (How is this possible??)
At seventeen, he stood up in front of his church group and spoke about his life. The room was stunned. He realized in that moment that his pain wasn’t just his — it was a bridge to other people’s pain. If he could look at an audience with no arms and no legs and say “I’m okay,” people who had legs and arms and still felt broken might believe they could be okay too. So he never stopped speaking.
Nic graduated from Griffith University at twenty-one with a double major in accounting and financial planning. In 2005, he founded Life Without Limbs, an international nonprofit ministry. In 2007, he launched Attitude is Altitude, a secular motivational speaking company. He has addressed audiences in over sixty countries. He has met twenty-one heads of state. He has written multiple bestselling books, including Life Without Limits, which has been translated into more than thirty languages. He starred in a short film called The Butterfly Circus and won Best Actor at an independent film festival. And then he found the thing he’d been most afraid he would never have.
In 2010, at a speaking event in Dallas, Nic locked eyes with a young nursing student named Kanae Miyahara. She was half Japanese, half Mexican, and she wasn’t looking at what was missing. She was looking at what was there. They fell in love. He proposed in 2011 on a yacht, using his mouth to slide the ring onto her finger. They married on February 12, 2012.
Today, Nic and Kanae have four children — two sons, Kiyoshi and Dejan, and twin daughters, Ellie and Olivia. All four were born healthy.
The young boy whose mother once couldn’t hold him now holds his children every night. Nic has spoken openly about the challenges of fatherhood without limbs — the frustration of hearing his baby cry and not being able to physically help. But he also speaks about what he can give them: presence, patience, faith, and an example of a life lived without excuses.
His mother is now one of his biggest supporters. She has spoken publicly about her initial grief and her journey to understanding that her son was not a tragedy — he was a gift. Nic Vujicic’s life does not prove that everything happens for a reason. It proves something more important than that.
It proves that when you refuse to let the worst moment of your life become the last chapter of your story, what follows can be extraordinary.
Nic’s life is truly an amazing and unlimited one. This is why I know for sure that nothing is impossible because it says in Matthew 19:26, Jesus said, “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.”
