Nick Vujicic on Overcoming Life’s Challenges

SPEAKER 02 : 0:00

This is Liz Franzel with Crawford Media Group, and today we are privileged to have Nick Vujicic with us today. He is the founder and CEO of Nick V Ministries, renowned speaker around the world and best-selling author. This month is National Human Trafficking Month, and we’ll be talking about his mission to end this horrific crime against humanity. Nick, it’s an honor to have you here with us today.

SPEAKER 01 : 0:23

Liz, thank you so much for having me on.

SPEAKER 02 : 0:27

Nick, you have such an amazing testimony and for our listeners that might not know, you were born with no arms or legs and you have overcome what some would say are impossible circumstances, but we know that all things are possible with God and you are a testament to that. Can you tell us a little bit about your story and how you overcame incredible challenges?

SPEAKER 01 : 0:50

Look, thank you so much for asking. I am so blessed at 42 years of age to be able to always let everyone know that first and foremost, having no limbs sounds pretty difficult. But I always tell people that it’s not about the physical difficulties as much as the disabilities of the heart and the mind. And for me, you know, people could look at me at school and judge me or decide if they interact with me, isolate themselves from me or even bully me. And I think it was around age six that I knew that I was different than everyone else. And for the first time, I thought, well, that might be an issue. I was raised in a beautiful, loving home, went to church every week. My dad was a pastor, and I was asked by many people, why were you born this way? I did not know why. My brother and sister were born with limbs. People then asked me, what do you want to be when you grow up? I had no idea what I wanted to be when I grew up. And I really felt like I was a burden to my parents. I had ups and downs at school as any student, but obviously had a lot of unwanted attention and definitely fears about my future. The Bible says that God has a hope, plan, and future, and I didn’t understand if that verse would really be for me ever. I thought I’d be a burden to everyone around me, never get married, never be happy, never have children, never even get a job. And so I premeditated and planned a suicide attempt at age 10. I attempted in my bathtub and tried to drown myself because all I could see were broken pieces. And by the grace of God, I was stopped by one thought, imagining my parents at my grave wishing they could have done something more. And I didn’t want to leave them with that pain. And I just am so glad I decided to stay by His grace. Age 15, I read John chapter 9, a man was born blind. No one knew why he was born that way. And Jesus was asked, why was he born with his disability? And I very much, as you can imagine, related to that story. The blind man gets the fingers of Jesus that are sticky and icky from the mud, and then he sees. And the blind man didn’t ask any questions. And I realized, God, if you had a plan for a blind man, And you have a plan for me. And the blind man didn’t ask for your plan, but he trusted you. And so, God, today I trust you with my greatest disability of death, of sin, that both you conquered on the cross, Jesus. And so I gave my life to Jesus at 15. At 17, I became vice president of my high school. I did a speech. And the janitor pulled me aside later, and he said, God’s going to use you to go around the world. and share your story. And I actually said, I have no story. I don’t know what you’re talking about. And by the grace of God, started ministry at age 19. I’ve now gone to 84 countries, met 34 presidents and prime ministers. A billion people in China know who I am, and a billion people in India know who I am. And then out of the story, obviously not preaching, preaching. But then outside of those two closed countries, We’ve been in many others preaching the gospel to 10% of the whole world.

SPEAKER 02 : 4:22

That is absolutely an amazing testimony and I thank you for sharing that. I know who you are and that’s why it’s such a privilege to be able to talk with you today and I’m so thrilled that we can share you with our listeners. Today we are talking about human trafficking because this month is National Human Trafficking. You know, it’s getting more attention but it’s still not really being acknowledged a lot by the media. Give us some insight on what it is and how this even happens.

SPEAKER 01 : 4:54

Yeah, look, there’s so many different things that I needed to learn. I really want people to go to nickveeministries.org, find out the champions for the Brokenhearted series, click on human trafficking. For two years, we’ve been actually interviewing experts in different fields, including human trafficking, to really understand where this really is in our own backyard and For about two decades, everyone thought that this was more of an international problem. But more so, people are realizing it’s actually happening in our own schools, in front of our own children. They don’t need to be as violent kidnapping people for sex slavery in our own backyard. They just get lured in from social media, actually, by peers of their school now. People don’t understand that a lot of media attention is not really going down to the root issue. People don’t still know that there are $100 million worth of lobbying money for bills to pass continually pornographic material in our country. People don’t understand that 67% of all teenagers are actually producing sexual images of themselves on their cell phones. People don’t understand that one in three girls by age 17 have been raped in America. One out of five boys by age 17 raped in America. What’s devious of all these things and other things that, I mean, it’s very dark, very heavy to also understand the CPS and foster care system. I have had many friends in the foster care, incredible opportunity to help these children. and they ask these three siblings who are two, four, and six, hey, let’s take a photo together as a family. And one of them says, okay, and comes back naked. And so there’s a ton, ton, ton of foster kids waiting to go into a loving, protected home. There’s a lot of corruption in our country, a lot of fragmented systems between county to county, and it’s pretty disgusting as we learn these things. But What’s most devious is no one who actually is being trafficked will say that they’re being trafficked because they don’t think they’re being trafficked because they actually get brainwashed. And so what’s crazy is, well, that’s just what we do. This is who we are. And this is my new circle. It’s unbelievable. And this is actually infiltrated to coaches, teachers and even parents in America.

SPEAKER 02 : 7:43

When you say infiltrated, what do you mean by that?

SPEAKER 01 : 7:46

Actually, softball coaches, basketball coaches, teachers of different tutorials, and even parents actually being part of the pimping and sexual acts. And more of that is going to be revealed here in America. Yaku Boyens is the tip of the spearhead of this issue. And as a church, you know, as a Christian… We need to go to what we really—I mean, no one’s really talking about this in the church at all. No one’s really bringing this in in education. Louisiana’s done a great job in bringing education for adoption and helping unexpected pregnancies with teenagers to know about adoption on just the precipice. It’s the first of its kind. It really needs to be mandated. That needs to be mandated. What also needs to be mandated is the real danger to parents as well to warn what human trafficking really is, to know the signs of your own child going through that. But what’s crazy is this. There are surveys out there that say that one in five men who go to church on a weekly basis are actually addicted to pornography. And we’re not talking about pornography. We’re not talking about, you know, just to Gen Z to keep your pants on. to understand the sexualization of a generation. And when we now look at, I mean, even Christian schools, go to the football little team there and hear their conversations. And if you overhear some conversations, you’ll actually probably hear someone asking their peers, how many trophies do you have? And that actually means how many girls have you slept with? And so the whole way that the enemy has come in and infiltrated and sexualized and debilitated our young people and attacking them without any buffer because they’re on their phone seven hours straight a day. And this is now, this is real. And there is a lot of work to do, a lot of work to do. And I think the church needs to be aware of it. educate their schools, every charter school, every Christian school, every public school, every home, but also in the church to start talking about this as, hey, how many foster kids can we get out of that risk?

SPEAKER 02 : 10:15

You had mentioned some of the training you do. What are some of the signs that we can look for that would kind of alert us to something that’s off?

SPEAKER 01 : 10:25

Yeah, look, it’s really peer-to-peer and really isolation and even some emojis. If you actually do some audits on your teenagers, as far as I’m concerned, everyone has their own house rules. But there are expert curriculum and signs of the types of emojis that pimps use, how they go trolling. You know, they’re meeting people that they’ve never met before or they’re being coerced in the school. There are signs of isolation. There are signs of even eye contact when they’re lying. And just to have an atmosphere at home of saying, don’t do this, don’t do that, don’t meet strangers, to actually sit down and have discussions with your family about what this really is. It is absolutely not surprising to me that 330,000 children are missing, with 3 million that have come over the border completely missing. But even before the border crisis that we have had in recent years, there’s hundreds of thousands of people. In DFW alone, there are estimated 400. I’m from Dallas-Fort Worth. estimated 400 active slaves being pimped every single night in Dallas. And it’s really interesting to know that those clienteles are normally people who earn more than $150,000, who have two children, and who are aged between 45 and 55 years of age. And you just would never believe that those are the people that are having sex with minors, And so even Native Americans, people don’t understand right now, Native Americans are seen as exotic. And so we’ve been to Native American reservations, and they’re taking, the Mexican cartels in Montana are taking daily children and women. And because of the jurisdictions, guess what? The federal government still has not been able to stop this kidnapping right in front of their eyes. And as soon as they get off the reservation, they actually can get away with it. It’s happening on a daily basis. Tons of missing kids from Native Americans. People have no clue what’s really going on.

SPEAKER 02 : 12:59

Yeah, that is tragic news. And such, you know, the statistics are so, so huge. We’re visiting with Nick Vujicic, founder and CEO of Nick V Ministries. renowned speaker and best-selling author, and we’ve been talking about the work his ministry is doing to help end human trafficking. Nick, would you tell our listeners where they can go to find out more about your ministries and actually get involved in this tragic crime against humanity?

SPEAKER 01 : 13:28

Please, thank you very much. nickveenministries.org is where you go. Go click the tab of Champions for the Brokenhearted. you will see then 12 topics that we’ve chosen, and one of them that we deep dive into is human trafficking. We have been doing that intentionally for two years. Check out Jacob Boyan’s ministry. Check out A21, Christine Kane. Check out other people out there that we have shown free resources for all churches, all families, and teenagers alike to just Help them understand we need to address this. We need to address this now and do all that we can and not rest until it’s done.

SPEAKER 02 : 14:13

Absolutely. Thank you for bringing this to light, Nick, and so much for joining us today.

SPEAKER 01 : 14:18

I love you so much. Thank you so much.