Unstoppable (6 page)

Yet one of the best ways to take the pain out of past experiences is to replace the hurt with gratitude. The Bible tells us that “all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.”

My uncle Batta Vujicic, who has faced difficult challenges in his real estate business, has helped me many times by gently repeating his mantra
of faith: “It’s all positive.” My young cousins put their own spin on it, saying, “Dude, it’s all good in the hood!”

During my meltdown I experienced something that you may have noticed in your own trials. As stress opened up old wounds and insecurities, my perception of what was going on became much worse than the reality of the situation. One tip-off that your response is out of sync with your actual situation is the use of inflated and exaggerated descriptions such as:

This is killing me
.

I will
never
recover from this!

This is absolutely the worst thing that’s ever happened to me
.

Why does God hate me?

And there is the always popular:
My life is destroyed
—forever!

I will not admit to actually saying any of those silly things during my recent tribulations, but some people who were in my vicinity might have thought they heard similar lamentations. (Or worse!)

Once again, I am honored to provide you with a good example of a bad example in my own behavior. The wielding of such over-the-top language should have served as a warning that my despair was excessive.

Here are my perceptions of what was going on:
I’m a failure! I’m going to go bankrupt! My worst fears are realized! I’m not able to support myself! I’m a burden on my parents! I’m not worthy of love!

Here is the reality of what was occurring: My business was experiencing a temporary cash-flow problem during an economic recession. We were fifty thousand dollars in the red, which was not good. But it certainly was not an overwhelming deficit, given the prospects for growth in the global
demand for our products and services. I majored in accounting and financial planning in college, and economics was part of the curriculum. I knew about supply and demand and cash flow, but what I knew was clouded by what I felt.

You may have experienced a similar sensation of being so overwhelmed, even though your actual situation was not nearly as devastating as it seemed. Our vision can become impaired by our feelings, and in the midst of despair, it can be very difficult to look at things realistically.

One of the lessons I learned is that you have to keep things in perspective, even when you are in the middle of a personal crisis. Fear breeds fear and worry builds upon worry. You can’t stop the feelings of grief, remorse, guilt, anger, and fear that wash over you during difficult times, but you can recognize them as pure emotional responses, and then manage them so that they don’t dictate your actions.

Maintaining perspective requires maturity, and maturity comes with experience. I had never been through a situation like this, and because I was physically drained by all my traveling, I had a difficult time handling this crisis in a mature manner.

My father and other older-and-wiser friends and family members tried to help me by telling me they’d been through similar or worse experiences and had bounced back. As I mentioned, my uncle Batta is in the real-estate development and property management business in California. You can imagine the ups and downs he has seen. An operating deficit of fifty thousand dollars is small change in his business, and he tried to tell me that it was not a crippling debt for mine either.

Still, as much as I would like to learn from other people’s advice and mistakes, for the longest time I seemed to need to make my own blunders before I gained any true wisdom. I’ve now resolved to be a better student. If you and I can learn just one lesson from every person we know, how much wiser would we be? How much time, effort, and money would we save?

When our loved ones and friends give advice, why can’t we listen, absorb the lesson, and make the necessary adjustments? You only increase your stress by thinking you have to fix things
right now
! True, some crises demand immediate action, but that action can include a step-by-step, one-day-at-a-time approach to problem solving. A member of my advisory board once made this point when he said, “Nick, do you know the best way to eat an entire elephant? One bite at a time.”

For years my father, the accountant, had been telling me to be careful with my finances, to save more than I spend, and to always have a budget in mind whenever I started a new project.

I tuned him out.
I’m a risk taker; he’s more conservative. We just have two different personalities. This is not the time to save; this is the time to invest and plant
. Humility is an interesting virtue because if you don’t have it, sooner or later it’s given to you. Imagine how humbling it was for me to have to accept my father’s offer of a fifty-thousand-dollar personal loan to bail out my business! That hurt, but it was a self-inflicted pain. Proverbs 16:18 tells us, “Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.” I’m pretty sure if you open your Bible to that chapter and verse, you will now see a photograph of me!

In reflecting upon my meltdown, I realized that my humility had been
lacking in several areas of my life. Why is humility important to someone going through a crisis? First of all, you may feel embarrassed if your situation is due to a mistake or a failure. In other words, you’ve been humbled. Getting mad, crying, or giving up won’t change that, and responding with negative emotions will probably only make you feel worse and drive people away from you.

My suggestion is that you embrace your newfound humility. Some batters react angrily to striking out. They break their bats over their knees, throw their helmets at the water boy, and kick dents into the dugout wall. Other batters humbly accept that striking out is part of the game, and they remember not to swing at the same pitches next time. So being humbled isn’t such a bad thing if you learn from the experience. In fact, there are those who believe that the truest path to enlightenment is through humility.

When I was younger, I developed a strong aversion to asking anyone for help. It’s a very humbling thing to have to ask those around you to help you eat or to lift you into a chair or to take you into the rest room. I didn’t like being humbled. There were certain benefits and rewards to becoming more independent by finding ways to do things for myself. I’m not saying it’s all bad, but my willful self-reliance sometimes led me to manipulate and even bully people into helping me. Instead of just asking for help, I’d wrangle favors from people, like my poor brother, Aaron, whom I often treated like a caregiver instead of a brother. Sorry, Aaron!

From time to time God would have to restore my humility. It had not dawned on me that sometimes I was very selfish, impatient, and proud. At times I felt like I deserved special treatment. But I have asked Aaron for forgiveness, and even though we don’t see each other a lot because of distance, he is my best friend, whom I admire and respect a great deal. I am
so surprised that when he was big enough to do so, he didn’t just put me in a cabinet and lock me in. I deserved it sometimes.

I came to see this dark period as another of those humbling reminders meant to put me back on course. I had been acting as though I had to carry the entire burden of all our operations on my shoulders. That was an arrogant and impossible approach, and it showed that my faith in God and those around me was not shining through.

Moses, the great prophet and leader, was the most humble man on the face of the earth. He knew that you cannot be a leader if no one is willing to follow and work alongside you. An arrogant person does not ask for help and thus is helpless. An arrogant person claims to know everything and thus is clueless. A humble person attracts helpers
and
teachers.

I once heard a father tell his son, a recent college graduate, that he should approach the first day of his job with a proper attitude: “Don’t try to show them what you know. Instead, show them how much you want to learn.”

If you find yourself overwhelmed by a crisis in your life, you may have to humble yourself and ask for help, and that is a good thing. None of us can accomplish our dreams without the help of others. Is it more important for you to feel superior and self-sufficient than to accomplish your dreams within a community of supporters?

Humility also fosters gratitude and appreciation, which are forces for healing and happiness. No single human being is more valuable than another. Somewhere I forgot that fact. The pride that led to my downfall clouded my memory and my vision. I had to remind myself that God doesn’t love me because my business shows a profit or because I speak two hundred seventy times a year around the world. He loves me because He created me. He loves me for me, and He loves you for you.

I still believe that those projects and dreams that I had to abandon during that difficult time were put in my heart for a reason. I believe that God gave me a clear vision and all I needed to plant them, but I should have prayed more to determine what His timing was instead of going ahead on my own. It’s not important who does the planting or who does the watering. What’s important is that God makes the seed grow.

While we may not always be faithful to God, He is always faithful to us. I had not been consciously putting my faith into action each and every day. I resolved to do that—not just to pray, but to move forward with perspective, patience, humility, courage, and confidence daily, knowing that where I am weak, God is strong, and what I lack, God will provide.

Faith, whether it is faith in yourself and your purpose or faith in your Creator, is a powerful beacon, but you have to let its light shine. You cannot allow it to be dimmed by neglect. Sometimes, you may feel like you have faith, but there is no light showing. I realized I had to let my faith shine. From a different perspective my faith had become like a car with the transmission in neutral. It was there, but it was not engaged. Having faith in yourself and your abilities is critical, but you must also have patience, humility, and the understanding that you cannot do anything without the help of others and, in the end, all credit goes to God.

Nothing will bring you down faster than living without purpose or losing track of whatever you are most passionate about: the gift that gives you joy and makes your life meaningful. I lost track of my purpose to inspire and encourage others while spreading the message of faith. I was trying to do too many other things to build my business and charity. When I
strayed from my true purpose, it was as if someone unplugged my power cord.

If you feel yourself sliding into despair, drained of energy, and depleted of faith, ask yourself,
What matters most to me? What gives me joy? What drives me and gives my life meaning? How can I get back to that?

You and I were put on this earth to serve something greater than our narrow interests. When our focus becomes self-centered instead of God-centered, we lose our greatest source of power. Our God-given talents are meant to benefit others. When we use them for that greater purpose, we put faith into action to fulfill His plan for us. We make a difference in this world that helps prepare us for the next.

I noted earlier that my meltdown left me serving as a good example of a bad example, so you might say that I did at least serve
some
purpose as a demonstration of faith gone inactive. Now I’d like to share with you the story of someone who is a great example of a
good
example of faith in action—one of the best I’ve encountered. In fact, I dedicated my first book to him, but I saved his story for this one.

I first learned of Phil Toth of La Jolla, California, through my mum when we still lived in Australia. My mother had heard of Phil and his Christian website through our church. She showed me his site, and I found his story of faith in action deeply moving. When Phil was just twenty-two years old, he woke up one day and had trouble speaking. At first his family thought he was joking, because he liked to tease and have fun, but then he also experienced dizziness and fatigue that alarmed everyone. For nearly two years his doctors couldn’t determine what was wrong, but they finally
diagnosed him with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), which is often called Lou Gehrig’s disease.

The life expectancy for one with this incurable disease, which destroys the motor nerve cells in the brain and spine and causes muscles to deteriorate, is usually two to five years. Initially, Phil’s doctors told him that his case was advancing so quickly that he might not survive another three months. Instead, Phil lived for five years, and I think it was because he did not focus on his suffering. He focused instead on encouraging others to pray and trust God. Phil dealt with his deadly illness by celebrating life and reaching out to help others, even though he could not lift his arms or legs from his bed.

ALS is both wickedly cruel and extremely painful. Within a few years, Phil was bedridden and unable to do much for himself. His large circle of loving family and friends provided constant care. Even his voice was affected, making it difficult for people to understand him.

Despite his pain and suffering, Phil remained deeply devoted to his Christian faith, and beyond that he even found a way to put his faith into action so that he could reach out to console and inspire others who were suffering debilitating and deadly illnesses. By God’s grace, with all his physical challenges, Phil created the website that my mother discovered through the church. Here is part of the message he posted about his illness and the impact it had on his faith: