Unstoppable

by Nick Vujicic

  Because of her foundation of faith, the first thing Jessica did when her doctor found the tumor and sent her for an emergency CT scan was to surrender the outcome to God. She did not give up at all. Instead, Jessica gave her fight to God by tapping into the highest source of power available. She called the pastor of her church, and he organized an emergency prayer meeting that same evening.

  In surrendering, “I had a peace that I cannot describe,” she wrote. “Only God’s children can understand the peace that I had. My whole world could have fallen apart at that very moment, but it didn’t. The circumstances may have been out of my control, but Christ was still in control of my life. I knew He was going to be with me the whole way through. I knew that there was a chance that I could die. In fact, many times I went to sleep thinking it might be my last moment on this earth. I saw the reality of my circumstances, but I also knew the reality of my God. I knew that if I were to die, I would be entering heaven and I would be in the arms of the Savior who loved me.”

  THE PEACE OF SURRENDER

  Take a deep breath. In … Out … Do you feel a sense of peace when you do that? We all long for that feeling of calm, don’t we?

  Our lives on this earth are not about what we want. You and I were created and placed in the natural world because of what God wants for us. He sent His Son to die for our sins, and Jesus made the ultimate surrender to follow His Father’s plan to give us the gift of eternal life. As Jessica notes, there is an incredible peace in surrendering our lives to Him just as Jesus did. The Bible tells us, “Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.”

  That peace can be yours only when you put your faith into action, surrendering your fears and any need to control your life, as well as any need to know the outcome of your actions. Instead, you put it all in God’s hands, committing to follow His will. When you are searching for God’s will in your life, whether it’s trying to make decisions or looking for opportunities, you can’t always expect a sign from God. Those are rare and wonderful occasions. What I’ve come to look for in trying to figure out what God wants is a sense of peace.

  If serenity remains in my heart as I pray and move forward with a decision to act on an opportunity, I feel like I’m following His will. If I lose that sense of peace at any point, I stop, pray some more, and reconsider. I believe if I’m headed the wrong way, God will change my heart and guide me.

  You may have many friends and advisors. Maybe you base your decisions on the alignment of the stars or a gut feeling. Everyone has a process. Mine is surrender. God understands us to the core because He created us. He feels what we feel, but His vision reaches those places we cannot see. There are many people I look to for advice and wisdom, but there is no one in God’s league when it comes to guidance. I’m grateful to have opportunities, and often it seems like I’m walking down the corridor of a giant hotel with hundreds of doors waiting to be opened. It’s difficult to know which doors are right for me, but through surrender, patience, and trust, God guides me.

  Of course, God may say no to your plan one day, but the next day He may say yes to something even better. You don’t know what God can do with your life until you give it to Him and feel the bliss in your relationship with Him. Whenever I become anxious about achieving my goals, I find peace knowing that I am here because God loves me and that He will be there when I let go.

  Jessica has experienced similar results after putting her faith in action, which she says means “getting up and following Christ even when you do not see or understand His ultimate plan. It means finishing the race even when you feel like calling it quits. It means choosing to love even when it hurts. It means getting up and serving even at the times you feel the most weary.” She adds, “Faith in action means looking outside of yourself to the souls around you who need to know that there is hope. It means trusting Christ to fulfill your needs and then getting up and helping fulfill the needs of others.”

  There is nothing quite as soothing as accepting that you don’t have to work it all out, because God will. You can surrender yourself to Him and then wait patiently. Through Him, everything is possible. When Jessica was feeling her worst, she told God to do with her whatever He desired. Letting go gave her great relief, she said, because “I knew if my life was spared, then Christ had a purpose for it.” There is tremendous peace, power, and freedom in that knowledge.

  Jessica’s cancer went into remission when she wrote to me six years after her original diagnosis. There was no sign of it in her body. She told me she was filled with gratitude even though her life had been forever changed and the aftereffects presented big challenges.

  With her doctor’s permission, Jessica returned to school and then to work. She became a medical assistant in a hospital’s oncology and neurology departments, where she helped patients face the same challenges she had overcome. But after several years the work was too hard on her weakened body. She went on disability leave and now focuses on God’s work.

  “Going through the experience made me so grateful for what I have. It made me more patient and very determined. I am now on a mission, and I understand my purpose,” she wrote. “My mission is to make sure people with serious health problems are able to experience the peace that I still have to this very day. This is the peace of knowing Jesus Christ as Savior. This is the peace that passes all understanding. The peace of knowing where you are going after you die. The peace of knowing that your life is in the hand of the Creator of the Universe. There is no safer place to be.”

  I heard from Jessica again just recently. It has now been more than eleven years since her tumor was found. She is still cancer-free, still grateful, and incredibly wise. Jessica has a much different perspective on her illness now. When she was first diagnosed, she thought God was punishing her for some reason. “I was looking at God only as a righteous judge, which He is, but I was forgetting that He is also a loving Father who only wanted the best for my life,” she said. “I was only seeing His rod of discipline, and I was not looking at His hand of mercy and compassion. I saw it more as giving me what I justly deserved. The fact of the matter is that God was dealing with me with great loving kindness. He was taking the ‘me’ out of me and putting more of Himself in.”

  When you place your life in God’s hands, you take the first step to becoming the person He intends you to be. There is great peace in that, and there is freedom and power too, because God works His miracles through those who give themselves up to His will. Jesus said, “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me.”

  Denying selfish interests—that is, shelving our own wants and desires and putting God first—is not an easy or natural thing for most people. Our earthbound bodies have powerful survival instincts that make self-preservation a priority. Even when we have a strong faith, the concept of surrendering all can be difficult to put into action and live every day.

  Although she said the prayer of salvation with great sincerity at the age of fourteen, “I really did not know what it meant to live the life of faith,” Jessica said. “I was still a very self-centered person. I thought the Lord was going to do things my way and fulfill all my dreams. At the time I had dreams of graduating college. I wanted to get married and have children—you know, the little ‘white picket fence’ life. I was very selfish, and I wanted everything that was going to make me happy.”

  Jessica believes that God used the illness of her body to strengthen her soul. She feels that being so sick forced her to focus on what being a Christian and giving her life to God really meant. Through her terrible pain and the loss of the life she’d known, Jessica found a path to wisdom and understanding beyond anything she’d ever experienced before. “God wanted me to realize that life was not given to me just for my own satisfaction,” she said. “In fact, that
is not the purpose at all. He wanted me to realize that life was given to me so that I could bring Him glory and be an encouragement for others. He wants the best for me, but He realizes the meaning of that more than I do.”

  THE MEANING OF SURRENDER

  Jessica found that meaning through surrender. “The way I view it, to surrender means giving to the Lord the things that you hold most dear. It means not holding on tightly to your idea of what will bring you happiness but trusting that He knows even better than you know the desires of your heart—and that He will give you a fulfilled life even if it is not in the way that you envisioned,” she said.

  I don’t know about you, but I am in awe of this young woman’s wisdom as well as her faith. The Bible tells us, “Delight yourself also in the LORD, and He shall give you the desires of your heart.” Note the psalm doesn’t advise us to take delight in ourselves and give ourselves the desires of our hearts. Yet we often get caught up in trying to create our own happiness instead of giving our lives to God and delighting in His love and the life He created for us. Most of the time, when we try to make ourselves happy, we are just distracting ourselves for a while. You realize this is true when your happiness doesn’t last or run very deep. A new car, a new dress, or a diamond ring doesn’t bring you anything like the sort of joy that God can create if you delight in Him.

  Jessica says she found the way to do this through “a life of daily surrender” even as she deals with the aftereffects of her battle with cancer. The intense pain of her cancer is gone. It is in remission, but now she has to live with the disabilities that have resulted from her disease and its treatment. Her speech is still distorted because her tongue and vocal cords are mostly paralyzed. She has difficulty eating and swallowing normally, and she is prone to pneumonia.

  Her lingering physical problems could make for a difficult life—if Jessica chose to wallow in her misery. Instead, she chooses each day “to remember that Christ is in control.” She told me, “I have to remind myself that the plans He has for me are plans to ‘prosper me and not to harm me, to give me a future and a hope.’ I have to surrender to the fact that even though I may not have the life I always dreamed of, I do have the life that Christ chose for me from before the world began. He has not made a mistake.”

  Like Jessica, I do not have the life I dreamed of as a child. I prayed for arms and legs because I thought they would make me happy. I thought that if I had arms and legs, I could take that deep breath and experience true peace. I believed that there could be no happiness for me without limbs. I didn’t think I could ever create a happy life for myself, and I was right. My happiness came only when I put my faith into action and surrendered my life to God. He showed me that I am perfectly imperfect, just as He designed me. And He has provided me with more desires of my heart than I ever could have provided on my own.

  Jessica is discovering the same in her own life. “The Lord has not brought me a husband yet, but He is daily showing me that He needs to be the love of my life,” she said. “I do not have children of my own, but the Lord has allowed me to mentor several teenage girls, and I consider them my spiritual children. I hope that I can live my life as a testimony to them that God is alive and still works miracles.”

  As Jessica notes, you don’t surrender your life to God and then expect each and every day to be all sunshine, flowers, and laughter. We live in the natural world, at least for now, and while sunshine, flowers, and laughter are part of that world, so too are blizzards, mosquito bites, and five-car pileups on the turnpike.

  Surrender is a minute-to-minute, hour-to-hour, day-to-day process. You give it up to God every step of the way. In my younger years, I spent a great deal of time questioning God and His plan for me. Now, I am more patient, and instead of asking, I wait for Him to reveal His answers in His own time.

  PATIENCE AND TRUST

  Patience is part of the surrender process—and so is trust. You and I tend to want answers now, but we have to trust that God has His own timetable. If we stay in faith and seek understanding, His plan will be revealed when we are ready for the answer. The purpose of a child born without arms or legs was a mystery revealed slowly as I grew in faith. As I’ve noted before, one of the keys for me was reading in John 9:3 about the man born blind. Jesus performs a miracle to heal him and explains that His purpose for this man was to use him to display God’s glory. This scripture helped me realize that God might also have a purpose for me. Maybe, like the man born without sight, I’d been created without arms and legs so that God could deliver a message or somehow work through me.

  As my understanding of God’s ways and life’s opportunities increased, He patiently put me on His path and opened my eyes to my purpose. Jessica said she has had a similar experience in dealing with her challenges from cancer and the treatments.

  “I know for me there were times when I felt I could not go on,” she said. “My voice is the one thing I have had a very hard time dealing with. I am hard to understand, and even though I may repeat myself several times, people may still not know what I am saying. It makes me feel very stupid and at times worthless.

  “There have been days when I did not feel like opening my mouth, and I was angry that the Lord allowed my voice to be affected because it is something I have to use every day,” she added. “The Lord showed me, however, that my voice is the very thing that gives me a platform to speak for Him. Because it is harder to understand me, people really have to take the time to listen. It also makes people realize that what I went through was real. It has given me several opportunities to witness and speak of what the Lord has done and is doing in my life.”

  I believe that when you surrender your life in full, with complete trust and patience, there is another great reward that comes your way: God’s strength. Since the age of eighteen, I have traveled the world, often visiting twenty or more countries each year. I’m not flying in private jets. The places I travel to are often dangerous, difficult to reach, and unhealthy due to disease, impure water, and lack of modern medical care. Yet somehow God keeps me healthy and gives me the strength to carry His message to millions of people.

  Jessica and I have both come to understand that surrender brings strength. “The times when I am the most weary are usually the times when Christ asks me to get up and serve the most. In helping others and seeing hopeless hearts find the peace of God, my own heart is then uplifted and I realize once again that the joy of the Lord is my strength,” she said.

  “So my suggestion to someone with tremendous challenges is to live life with a heart that is surrendered. Always remember that even though things may be hard here, Christ calls these our ‘light and momentary troubles.’ He says that they are bringing us an ‘eternal weight of glory.’ Look outside of yourself and reach out to souls that need the Lord and His love. In doing that, the Lord will fulfill your needs and make you see that He loves you beyond measure,” Jessica said.

  This young woman of God is incredible, isn’t she? She told me that the Lord may come at any time, but she wants to be found faithful when He does. “I pray that I will be filled up knowing that my worth comes from Him,” Jessica told me.

  You and I may like to think that we are in command of our lives, our comings and our goings, but once we commit our lives to Him, God is in command every minute of every day. Our gracious heavenly Father often overrides my carefully made plans by revealing His own deep, unfathomable ways, and I am humbled every time. I marvel at the beauty and pure brilliance of God’s divine plan each time. Sometimes I think back to what it must have been like to have been a disciple and an apostle and a witness to God at work through Jesus on earth, moving in indescribable ways. I can almost picture His followers returning to their own congregants scattered throughout the Roman Empire and reporting back to the believers saying, “You’ll never believe what God did!”

  The power of Jesus is here. When you put your faith in action by surrendering all to Him, you won’t believe what God will do for you. I promise you
will discover an exciting life when you put yourself in His hands. Look forward, then, to a life in faith, believing that Christ intends to use us as we intentionally surrender to His hope-filled, meaningful purposes for us. Allow His cleansing love to flow freely and at full force through your life. As the psalm tells us, “Taste and see that the LORD is good.”

  NINE

  Sow Good Seeds

  ON MY FIRST VISIT TO LIBERIA A FEW YEARS AGO, MY GOAL WAS TO INSPIRE as many people as possible with a message of hope and faith. Given the country’s reputation, I had no idea that this embattled African country and its long-suffering people would inspire me as well.

  This small coastal nation founded by freed American slaves had long been known as one of the poorest, most violent, and most corrupt countries in the world. Although it was once among Africa’s most educated and industrious nations and rich with natural resources, Liberia suffered greatly for more than thirty years due to political upheaval. Most damaging were two civil wars lasting until 2003. More than two hundred thousand Liberians were killed during that war. Millions more fled to other countries. Sex slavery and drug trafficking ran rampant.

  The deep scars of violence and corruption were still very much in evidence when we arrived in 2008. Most of the roads were barely drivable. Electricity was rare outside urban areas, and even there it was sketchy. Only a quarter of Liberians have access to clean drinking water. Dead animal carcasses fouled the air and sickened our stomachs. Many people along our travel route appeared malnourished and destitute. Time after time, we saw men, women, and children rooting through trash bins and piles of garbage.