The power to stand
Published 5:10 pm Monday, July 4, 2016
The young man in a wheelchair was pushed up the ramp to the stage in the front of the room. Before him were more than 200 newspaper professionals, gathered for a Texas Press Association Meeting. And in opening, he turned the tables on the journalists with a question of his own: “Do you know how you can tell if a person in a wheelchair is truthful?” He waited for a minute while we looked at each other, most of us thinking the same thing, “What’s he talking about?” Then he smiled and said, “Just look at the bottom of their shoes to see if they are clean or dirty.” The crowd roared with laughter as a smile broke across his face. And with the tension broken, Chris Nortan began to tell his story.
At the age of 18, he suffered a severe spinal cord injury while playing college football. While lying on the football field immediately after the accident, he could tell something was very wrong. He couldn’t move anything from the neck down. Fear came over him. “This wasn’t supposed to happen to me,” he thought.
When doctors told Nortan he was facing paralysis for the rest of his life, he very easily could have fallen into depression, questioning why life had thrown him this curveball. But instead, he faced his adversity head on. He called on his faith, refused to yield to the injury and found “the power to stand.”
Nortan knew it was going to be a slow process, but he had an internal drive and family support. He refused to allow this life-altering event to define the rest of his life. He set goals for himself, goals that for you and me would seem very attainable. But for Chris, they were daunting. First he wanted to move his arms and hands. He wanted to hug his mother and his girlfriend again. After countless hours of rehabilitation, he was able to move his arms. He asked his mother to help lift him and, as she bent in front of him, he threw his arms around her — giving what he called “the best bear hug she had ever received.” Together, they wept with joy.
Next, Nortan wanted to walk again. His goal was to walk across the stage during his college commencement ceremony and receive his diploma. After four years of strenuous rehabilitation and loving support from family, he stood before thousands of cheering people as he walked, with assistance from his girlfriend, across the stage to receive his diploma.
Nortan now travels the country sharing his story. His philosophy in life is while everyone faces some measure of difficulty, no one should be defined by those difficulties. He calls on audiences to focus on responses, instead of situations, and to be defined by attitude rather than circumstance.
We all succumb to some form of adversity during our life. However, some of us take on more than we ever thought we could handle, ultimately finding that our main adversary in life, is our own self-limiting attitude. The choice in how we react to a life-changing event lies within us all. But we really never know how we will handle such adversity, until we actually need to.
I believe we can see glimpses of how we might react and how we might handle these types of challenges by how we live our day-to-day lives, how we work with others and how we handle common everyday stress. For it is there that we will find that we have “the power to stand.
Rich Macke is the publisher of the Port Arthur News.