Man without limbs can text, write — inspire

If you're hosting a pity party, Nick Vujicic writes in his new book, don't expect an invitation to dance.

Vujicic meanwhile is busy doing the jive, quite a feat since he was born with no arms or legs.

The Australian moved to Los Angeles a few years ago with his ministry Life Without Limbs, which has him traveling the world to speak to crowds, from slum dwellers to presidents.

But the one person who gave him "a wave of feeling through me so intense," that it would have made his knees buckle "if I had them," was a little boy he met four years ago in Anaheim.

Vujicic was at Knott Avenue Christian Church, where he'd come to speak to the congregation, when he heard someone calling out his name. He looked around to see a man in the crowd holding a toddler above his head. It was, he says, a darling gap-toothed child — with no arms or legs.

That boy, Daniel Martinez, is a passage in Vujicic's new book "Life Without Limits" (Doubleday), which recently hit stores.

"The vision of this boy in front of me touched the boy inside me," Vujicic writes, adding that it actually made him woozy.

It was the first time in his life he had ever met anyone remotely like him.

"He even had a little foot like mine."

Vujicic's little foot, by the way, is a veritable magic wand. Just check out the YouTube of Vujicic in a text messaging contest at an Anaheim Rubio's. He's competing with Kyle Bonenberger, the City Church pastor, who made headlines for tattooing his church's logo on his arm and inspiring six followers to do the same at a recent service.

I won't tell who wins the competition, but let's just say the loser gets smoked.

The point is, there was a time in his childhood when Vujicic wished he could die and now he spends his days inspiring thousands of others to stop lamenting and start living.

"What I've seen in life are just a couple key principles. And the first thing that I've seen is just to be thankful," he said in a YouTube video.

Vujicic has in fact surfed (once on the same board as Bethany Hamilton who lost her arm to a shark in Hawaii). He also has skateboarded, scuba dived and tumbled out of an airplane.

That's not to say there haven't been dark days. He writes that as he got older, his mother, a pastor's wife, admitted to him she was so upset after his birth that she had trouble looking at him. She had no idea until his birth that her baby was missing his limbs, with only a small foot with two toes at the bottom of his torso.

Vujicic himself used to beg God to let him grow arms and legs — for God's benefit, of course. (A modern-day miracle! Think of how many people you could convert!) It never happened. But he began to realize that maybe he didn't need to grow arms and legs for his life to mean something. Maybe his accomplishments were enough of a miracle.

His two toes were connected at birth, but when he was still a boy his parents had them surgically separated so he could use them like fingers. He went on to get two college degrees (and can type 43 words a minute).

"I just hope that people are inspired to live life without limits," he told me after a book signing in Toronto. "Fear is bigger than having no arms and no legs."

He tells people that he doesn't believe in comparing sufferings, who's to say that one person's burden is heavier than another's.

"We just want people to know there is hope and a greater purpose in their lives. No matter what."