Posted by Mike O on: 03.01.2007 /
We had a snowstorm roll through town last weekend so our Sunday morning church service was cancelled. So my wife and I watched “The Hour of Power” on TV and they had a special guest on named Nick Vujicic. Click here for a link to the Hour of Power interview. Scroll to 2/25/07.
Nick was born with no arms or legs, yet he talks about God’s grace, and how he is fearfully and wonderfully made. How can he do that? How can he say “I am fearfully and wonderfully made,” yet when we see someone in his position, we wonder how “a loving God” could allow such a thing? I don’t know, but could it be that somehow suffering is useful in helping us count our blessings? Could it be that somehow there’s a link between suffering and gratitude?
Here’s a video of him preaching at another church.
And here’s one of his life at home from when he was younger. This one is a promo video for his ministry.
If you look beyond the ministry aspects of his life and just look at him as a man, you have to admit that what he has accomplished and his positive outlook on life are inspiring.
By the way, in the Hour of Power interview, he mentions that he has a double major in Financial Planning and Accounting (If I remember right), and he can type 43 words a minute. Amazing.
Comment by: Ir (Helen)
1(Btw that storm which cancelled your church service cancelled my husband’s flight to London also - he wasn’t very happy about that Sunday morning. But he was able to get on an evening flight which did go - even though it was very late - and so things worked out ok)
Thanks for posting about Nick Vujicic - I hadn’t heard of him before.
I watched some of the videos. I found myself very drawn to him - he seems like a very likeable person - funny, engaging, upbeat.
I could do without the preaching and Christianese. Setting that aside - I’m glad he had a supportive family to grow up in; I appreciated him sharing honestly that he did get angry about his birth defect and wanted to die when he was eight years old.
I wince a bit at “I thank God for having no arms or legs” - that makes no sense to me. But I’m very happy for him that he has found a way to have a positive outlook on life and not be continually jealous of people born without birth defects.
And I do find it inspiring and it helps me put my own ‘problems’ in perspective. He said his message is:
Which I would ‘translate’ into:
I like that he said, other people suffer too and
In other words, just because someone has all their limbs it doesn’t mean that they might not be undergoing some other major challenge/suffering in their life.
He said these are two things every human being wants to know:
I think we would all like to believe everything is going to be ok and many of us do care very much whether we are loved.
I think it’s possible to find hope and a purpose in life even if we have no guarantee everything is going to be ok (which is what I believe) and even if we can’t count on our relationships always coming through for us and making us feel loved (which is what I find to be the reality of my life).
I am happy Nick has the resources to help him be fairly independent. This is nothing against Nick but I can’t help wondering what happens to people who do not have those resources.
Anyway thanks for the introduction to Nick. Seeing what he deals with all the time does help put my own stuff in perspective, as I said. I think there are other ways to find hope than through the particular beliefs he has - nevertheless I’m glad he did find hope and can be cheerful about a life in which he is unable to do many things other people can do.
Comment by: Mike O
2I almost didn’t post it because it was preaching, but if people can just understand that the audience he was speaking to related to the Christianese, I think that would help you see past that. And the message is still useful, even if you don’t by into the spiritual aspects of it.
One thing I’m curious about … how does he translate to the irreligious audience (it’s not offensive to say ‘irreligious’, is it)? Do you find him engaging? Are his words encouraging even though you don’t buy the whole of the message? I like to think I can be encouraged by people I don’t agree with - just because we may not see things the same way, they still can make valuable contributions to my life.
Comment by: Ir (Helen)
3I find his example of being cheerful and having a positive outlook in spite of challenging circumstances inspiring.
Mike, can I turn this around: what did he say that you think an atheist would find encouraging? (I know you said you were going to be for a couple of days so I can wait for the answer) The reason I’m asking is that he said so much about God it’s hard for me to extract things which apply to people who have no believe in God. I did sort of ‘translate’ one thing he said in my comment above. But I did have to change the words and take God out.
Comment by: Mike O
4Maybe just the whole positive outlook thing, and the gratitude he seems to have.
It’s easier for me to turn it around and let’s say he’s a wiccan or something … I’d probably disregard everything he said. I like to think I’d still admire his engaging disposition, but at some level, I would probably just think it was sad that he had such a great attitude, but was still so wrong.
Is that what this felt like to you? Cheerful enough chap, but so sad he’s still got the religion baggage?
I’m not trying to put words in your mouth - the psychology of this question is interesting to me.
Comment by: Ir (Helen)
5It didn’t feel sad to me that he has Christian beliefs - just irrelevant to where I’m at right now. So, much of what he said was irrelevant to me.
Does that make sense?
Hmmm…well, what if an atheist gave a talk saying that the way to be happy was to stop believing in God and every few words he kept repeating how glad he is that he now knows the truth - that there is no God/gods.
Would you easily be able to watch that - wouldn’t his continual references to God not existing be a distraction to you, at the very least? And even if they don’t bother you, wouldn’t you feel that looking for things to encourage you in there is a bit like having to find a few needles in a haystack?
Bottom line - listening to a talk like that is a very ‘inefficient’ way for me to be encouraged when I could go listen to someone who manages to have a positive outlook without tieing it all into what I can’t say I believe.
Comment by: Mike O
6I get that.
Still, like I said at the end of my original post …
Comment by: Karen
7See, that attitude is the sad thing, to me. You could look at someone who’s this inspiring and positive and who’s achieved much with his life and disregard everything he said because his beliefs don’t match your own? Sorry, but that’s harsh, man.
I look at this Nick guy and I’m inspired. He’s a happy person who’s overcome a lot and done very well. He’s dedicated to something that’s meaningful to him.
I don’t agree with his beliefs, in fact I think he’s probably wrong about Christianity, but that doesn’t make me disregard everything he says. It just means I don’t share his beliefs. And that’s okay!
(I love that I can be this forgiving, by the way. As a fundamentalist Christian, I would definitely have judged a Wiccan as severely as you would.)
BTW, disabled people can be incredibly happy and motivated without god. One of our best friends is a dwarf and an agnostic. He’s married to a gorgeous woman who adores him, he’s an attorney who litigates in courts all over our area, he became president of an international service club and traveled all over the world representing them and doing great things for the poor, he’s financially successful, funny, insightful and warm. His only regret in life, he’s told us, is that he never had children (the disability is genetic and he and his wife chose not to pass along the gene). However, he’s accepted this fact and moved on with life. He and his wife raise beautiful dogs that have become their “kids.”
Once people get past their first look at him, they never even think about his disability. It literally becomes “invisible.”
Comment by: benjamin ady
8Mike,
wanted to address your “is there a link between suffering and gratitude?” thing.
This might be related to degree. Like– well, I guess dead people don’t feel gratitude. I think if we can get our heads around the totality of our life story in a way that allows us to make some kind of sense of that story, to appreciate it’s beauty, then that can lead to gratitude. and often that story wouldn’t be as amazing or as compelling or as beautiful without the suffering.
But what I meant be “degree” is that “getting our heads around our life story” *requires*, I think, a certain … cessation of suffering, to some extent–a certain amount of suffering free space within which to work on getting our head around our life story. So in the absence of that space, or cessation, then gratitude is not going to happen. I mean to say that someone among those 25,000 children who are starving to death (that is, finally dying of the starvation) today isn’t likely to feel a lot of gratitude. Someone who is living in hell as, for instance, a trafficked sex slave, being forced to have sex with many men every day with little hope of escape, isn’t going to feel a lot of gratitude. someone who is being tortured by the CIA at some black site in a foreign country isn’t going to feel a lot of gratitude. and all these people are suffering enormously.
BICBW
Comment by: Mike O
9Sorry it took so long to reply … I was out of town at a basketball tournament … we didn’t do so hot. Anyway, when I said the things that triggered this response from you, Karen, my intent was not to say that I’m right, but just to say that’s where I’m at with it. Helen had asked,
and I was only acknowledging that in that case,
Maybe I’m wrong … but that’s where I’m at today. I mean, don’t you at some level think the same thing about me in regards to evolution? That I “just don’t understand”? Maybe that would have been a better way to say it than to say it was sad.
Comment by: Mike O
10Ben, I get what you’re saying about suffering. I guess I was thinking more about the other end of the spectrum, to those of us here in America who have it so good. We get spoiled so much that we don’t realize how good we have it, so we whine and complain about the pettiest of things. But lose a parent … or your limbs, and the things you have seem to have much more value in your eyes.
That has nothing to do with the sex slaves or starving … that’s a whole different thing.
By the way, have you read “Man’s search for Meaning” by Viktor Frankl? It’s a really good book. He was a jew who survived in concentration camp and wrote about how he survived the atrocities there. It’s quite good.
Another good one is a video called “Born into Brothels” which I still have never seen, but I’ve heard is a heart-wrenching look at the lives of the children of prostitutes in the Red Light District of Calcutta.
Comment by: Karen
11Ah, sorry to hear it! My kids play basketball and I know all about the disappointments (and triumphs) of the court.
And I really, really appreciate your honesty, Mike O. In fact, I very much hesitated to comment critically because I don’t want to squelch your ability to be honest about where you are at. That’s important.
But I also think it’s important to good discussion to react honestly and not limit the debate out of “niceness” or not wanting to ruffle someone’s feathers. It turns into a pretty dull discussion at that point.
What caught my eye wasn’t so much that you’d think a Wiccan was wrong - that’s pretty obvious. What I thought was sad is this comment:
It seems to me like you’re limiting your ability to appreciate a whole lot of things in life just because they might come from a source who doesn’t agree with your belief system.
I mean, I don’t believe in Wicca either, but I could certainly take away a lot of good things from this guy anyway, whether he’s a Wiccan, a Christian, a Mormon, or what have you. Obviously something in his life has sustained and supported him such that he’s able to achieve so much, and that’s worth paying some attention to, at least.
So I can’t imagine me totally discounting him, no matter where he’s coming from in terms of religious belief.
I don’t think there’s a comparison to be made between someone’s religion and whether or not he accepts evolution. We’ve already gotten past that, right? That it’s possible to be a religious believer and accept science even if it contradicts a literal reading of Genesis?
Comment by: Mike O
12Maybe. I’m admittedly still working this out in my mind, but like Jim says (paraphrase), “When people like each other, the rules change.”
I could like a Wiccan. Like we have here, as long as it didn’t spiral into a constant bashing of beliefs, I think we could be friends. I don’t see myself searching out any to test my theory, but if I found myself in a relationship with someone and then found out they were wiccan, I wonder how I would react.
I can’t say with confidence that I could have with a wiccan the kind of relationship I have here with atheists. I may be a bit too paranoid for that because it would all be at a spiritual level. But I wonder how I would handle it.
I wonder how I should handle it.
Comment by: Ir (Helen)
13Mike, I expect you could have just as good a relationship with a Wiccan as with an atheist. It’s maybe just that you don’t know any, so you can’t envisage how it would go.
Comment by: Karen
14I know several Wiccans. They’re just regular folks, like us atheists and like you Christians, but they have different ideas about supernatural things and a different concept of the divine. They’re not “in your face” about it and they don’t proselytize (that I’ve seen).
Looking at your example here of being open-minded and not easily offended, I’d say you’d have no problem appreciating at least something about a Wiccan who had a compelling personal story like Nick’s.
You should handle it whatever way you see fit, I’d say. ;-)
Comment by: geoff
15I have worked with nick when I was in Indonesia and everything he says in his interview he lives out.
Comment by: Julie Maire
16I agree, Frankls way of approaching “getting our mind around” sufferring is very useful. I picked up the book when I was in my teens, and didn’t realize how much it had affected my core approach to my lifes struggles until I reread it 2 years ago. It doesn’t shortcut the hard work of finding meaning in pain via supernautural assist, which, in retrospect, I find interesting, personally - because most of my adult life I looked for theistic solutions…yet, my core framework was full of humanistic answers. What an odd little duck I was. Some might say that of me now, too…;)
Comment by: Jeff
17Well, i wouldn’t be surprised about Wicca and all of the things involved with it…
You can see the example of what i’m talking about here:
Wicca Spells
Talk about sanity, huh..
Comment by: M Clark
18I too was inspired by this guy, but when my little son wrote to him shortly afterwards, and didn’t receive a reply, I was disillusioned - my son is exactly like Nick - one tiny left leg and a tiny bud for his right arm and that’s it! I had really hoped he would reply - I wanted my son to hear from him so much. I guess Nick is too caught up in everything.