By Dan Wooding, ASSIST Ministries     Wed. March 12th, 2008, 

SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA (ANS) — When I first met Australian Nick Vujicic, I couldn’t believe that he could smile so much, having faced such incredible setbacks in his life.
 
You see, Nick, who is originally from Melbourne, Australia, was born without arms or legs, yet he is a living witness to the power of Christ in his life.

Now based in Southern California, Nick agreed to tell me his story.  “There was no medical reason why this happened,” he began. “I was born in a Christian home and now I’m twenty-five years old and I travel around the world and share with people how God has not forgotten them in their pain, but he has purposes in their circumstance and that His grace is sufficient and that He’s going give them strength to get through whatever He’s has brought them to.

“I started my ministry – Life Without Limbs — when I was nineteen years old and I felt the Lord leading me to live out here in the United States and basically I go around to a lot of churches to do city wide outreaches and share with people how there are times in their life where they may not understand and you don’t see God in their life but I tell them despite that, that He is faithful.”

I asked Nick if he ever got angry with God for his disability.

“I definitely was angry with God when I was eight years old and I didn’t really want anything to do with God,” he said. “I felt like He owed me an explanation of why He did this to me. Between the ages of eight and twelve I really didn’t see much hope to my life and over the journey of my childhood, I was often thinking of how to commit suicide.

“But at the age of fifteen, I read in John chapter nine, where a man was
 
born blind. Jesus was asked why this man was born blind and He said it was done so that the ‘works of God may be revealed through him’ and, as I read this, a wave of faith and peace came over me. I realized that no one knew why that man was born blind and no one knew why I was born this way, but Jesus did and Jesus does know why He did this to me – so that the ‘works of God maybe revealed…’

“Now I just share what it says in Jeremiah, chapter twenty-nine, verse eleven, that He has a hope, a plan and a future for all our lives He’s with us all the way.”

I then asked Nick what he would like to say to people with a disability.

“I believe we all have disabilities, whether it’s a physical disability or fear or guilt,” he said. “Fear or guilt will hold you back more than the loss of arms and legs. I would like to say to everybody out there that you should just know that God loves you. I don’t know your pain and God is the only one that can tell you the two things that your soul longs to hear: number one that you are loved and number two, everything’s going to be ok.”

Then Nick revealed that he is now spending much of his efforts in reaching out the Muslim nations of the world.

“The Lord has used my life without arms and legs to go into Muslim nations such as Indonesia and speak the Gospel there and see many come to the Lord,” he said. “Around the world many Muslim nations are inviting me and governments are inviting me to go there to talk. This year we’re doing nineteen countries including Liberia, Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, and Uganda, to spread the Gospel.”