Welcome to Love Without Limits, a book that I hope will inspire and benefit you and many others looking for guidance on finding love and sustaining loving relationships.
This book's title springs from a couple of sources, one of which is Life Without Limbs, the non profit organization that supports my evangelical work around the world. The name relates to the fact that while I was born without arms or legs, my God-given purpose to inspire others has resulted not in being disabled but rather in my becoming highly enabled to live a full life without limbs.
My first book spun the life without limbs phrase and took it a step further. We called that book Life Without Limits, because in it I shared my experiences and thoughts on building a ridiculously good life no matter what challenges you face, whether they are physical, mental, or emotional.
That brings us to the origins of this book's title, Love Without Limits. I've often written and spoken about the insecurities that dogged me as a child and young man. Because of my lack of limbs, I feared no woman would ever love me or want to marry me. I had many doubts about my fitness as both a husband and father. Frankly, there were people close to me who had their own concerns in that regard. Some thought I would never marry or be able to support a family of my own.
For a long time, it seemed they might be right. I had the usual grade school crushes, but no long-term relationships in my teenage years. Only in my twenties did I begin to feel more confident. By the time I was twenty-seven years old, I'd had some relationships that started out strong but ended sadly. One of them, in particular, was quite serious. When this girl broke it off because she would not move forward without her parents' blessing, I was devastated. At that point, it seemed there were very real limits to the amount of love in this world, at least for me in my quest for a wife. Even though my family and closest friends were there for me, I'd become all but convinced that no woman would want to marry such an obviously imperfect man as me.
As you will learn in the pages that follow, I was flat wrong about that. So wrong, in fact, that I'm a little embarrassed to remember how despondent and self-critical I'd become after losing at love...
