“You’ll never be happy if you surrender to the circumstances.”

Those are the words of Paralympic snowboarder Amy Purdy. At nineteen, she contracted Neisseria meningitidis and lost both her legs, her kidneys and her spleen. Though she only had a two percent chance of survival, she kept her life and grew her outstanding spirit.

Amy never had great ambitions for athletics. She grew up loving music and art. At 15 she fell in love with snowboarding simply because it was something fun to do with friends. After her illness, it was her desire to snowboard that pushed her to figure out how to walk again. So she built herself prosthetic legs.

She continued to not surrender to sadness. She created a non-profit organization called Adaptive Action Sports to help athletes with physical disabilities. She campaigned to get snowboarding into the Paralympic Games and succeeded. In 2014 and 2018 she took home Olympic medals for the United States.

Amy will never have her legs, her kidney or her spleen back. But she’s found purpose, ability and happiness where she’s at.

Jesus gives that contentment, too. As we surrender our circumstances to Him, He helps turn both the painful times and the joyful ones into a win.