Author and professional keynote speaker Christopher Coleman was pronounced dead at birth, but miraculously survived. Though he struggles with cerebral palsy, he knows his disability is a gift.

It was a breech birth with twins eight weeks premature — and the delivery was not going well. The doctor untangled the slippery umbilical cord wrapped around the baby boy’s neck. There were no vital signs. Placing the lifeless body on a steel table at the back of the delivery room, the doctor mentally noted the time: 8:21 p.m., Oct. 20, 1973. Christopher Coleman was pronounced dead at birth, and a nurse placed a sheet over his tiny body. As the doctors turned their attention to the second twin, a girl, they heard it — a cry from the back of the room. The first twin was struggling for air.

He was alive, but his prognosis was grim. While his sister, Christal, seemed fine, Christopher had gone for at least 15 minutes without breathing and had undoubtedly suffered extensive brain damage. Doctors diagnosed him with cerebral palsy and concluded that he would never walk, talk, move or even think for himself.

Christopher’s father took one look at his frail son and walked out of the hospital and away from his 10-year marriage. Linda Coleman and her seven children were on their own. Despite the overwhelming obstacles ahead, Linda never once considered placing her helpless son in an impersonal institution. Instead, she worked two jobs to provide for her family and still made time to drive her two-year-old boy to the Association for Retarded Citizens near Baton Rouge, La., where specialists discovered he wasn’t as mentally retarded as doctors feared.

At the age of five, Christopher enrolled in an elementary school with a special class for handicapped students 40 miles from home. Three afternoons a week, his mother also drove him to speech and physical therapy. But any hope he had evaporated when he entered a state-run school for the disabled at six years old. “I remember the blank walls,” he says. “I stared at them for hours while I sat strapped like a prisoner in my wheelchair. I couldn’t walk, I couldn’t talk and I couldn’t move. No one talked to me. No one even wiped my nose or took me to the bathroom. I often sat in my soiled clothes for an entire day, embarrassed and frustrated.”

His mother never knew how badly he was treated at school. He couldn’t communicate with her, and the aides explained his soiled clothes as an accident on the bus ride home. Although he always felt his mother’s love, he defined himself by the way the world treated him. “I never felt I was worth much,” he says. “I wondered why I was born like this, what I had done to deserve this condition.”

By this time, his twin sister was in first grade and learning to read — and Christopher felt left out. At night, when his family was asleep, he crawled into the bathroom and studied the letters on the pages of his sister’s books. It wasn’t until he was 14, however, that his mother discovered he could read. He revealed his ability to read by reading a weather bulletin off the tv during a bad storm. “My mom rushed over to me, crying and laughing at the same time,” he recalls.

He entered Nichols State University’s pre-law program after graduating from high school. At the end of his sophomore year Christopher made the bold move to Marietta, Ga., to finish his education at Southern Polytechnic State University. It was at Southern Polytechnic that Jonathan Carter became his personal assistant. “Jonathan helped me confront my fear of who I was, disabilities and all,” he says.

Jonathan spoke to him kindly, never becoming frustrated or annoyed with his physical limitations. One day, when Christopher sneezed all over him uncontrollably, Jonathan just softly said, “It’s OK.” Those simple words echoed in his head. “It’s OK. It’s OK that I can’t move my body the way other people move. It’s OK that I can’t speak as clearly as other people. I’m OK just the way I am,” he thought.

Christopher no longer resents his wheelchair or his physical condition. He says, “It hasn’t been easy living a life in a wheelchair, but it has been a life of freedom rather than confinement. I can truly say that I have joy in my heart.”

Christopher Coleman lives in Acworth, Ga., and speaks to Christian organizations, businesses, schools, and civic groups around the world through “Unlimited Leadership” and “Empowered Ministries”