“A hop of faith”

In a Nike “Sport Changes Everything” commercial, Amy Bream balances on her prosthetic leg, then rotates her 5-foot-2 frame to deliver a swift kick to a heavy bag. She’s the definition of a confident athlete, sparring with a trainer in a boxing ring, lifting weights, and doing pull-ups on gym rings.

But Bream, 29, didn’t always feel this confident in her body. She remembers as a 7-year-old standing in front of her sister’s floor-length mirror, inspecting her outfit before heading to church with her family in Boiling Springs, Pa. Turning around slowly, she saw a little girl with brown hair, a flower-covered pink Easter dress, and a prosthetic leg. “You look like an idiot,” she told herself.

Bream, born with a rare birth defect called proximal femoral focal deficiency, has no right hip and only part of a right leg. The birth defect took the Breams off guard: All the sonograms showed a perfectly normal baby girl. But from the moment she was born, they were adamant about teaching her that “this is not a mistake. Jesus loves you and created you this way.”

Bream never doubted that God had a plan for her life. Still, the questions crept in: Why me, out of all people?

In middle school, she would cry on her bed at night, wishing she could be normal. In high school, she wore jeans at the beach to cover her leg, sweltering on the sand while her siblings played in the water. Wherever she went, it seemed like people stared at her.

I love my body because Jesus loves me, Bream would tell herself. But when she looked at herself in the mirror, she tried to move her leg out of view. What would it be like to have two legs? she wondered.

At Messiah College in Pennsylvania, she majored in commercial music. When she played the piano and saxophone, she always crossed her real leg over her prosthetic leg in photos. No one questioned it—until her brother-in-law called her out during her senior year. “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” he responded when Bream said she avoided shorts.

“People react to you,” he said. “If you’re confident, people will see you as confident and not even make the leg a subject.”

Bream was taken aback, wondering if it was just her own fear holding her back. So she forced herself to wear shorts and dresses in public, bracing herself for stares. After graduating and moving to Nashville to work in marketing, she got a new prosthesis without a cosmetic cover, leaving the metal leg exposed. For the first week, she wore long pants over it.

Her doctor instructed her to exercise with her new leg before the week was up. So she put on shorts, drove to a boxing gym—and made a beeline for the bathroom. “Tell me everything’s going to be OK,” she begged a friend over the phone.

“You did this for a reason,” her friend said. “This is going to be worth it. You have to go back outside.” Bream forced herself to walk out of the bathroom. As she boxed with the rest of the class, she found she was enjoying herself.

Developing confidence took a while. Bream kept showing up at the gym, doggedly determined to reach new goals. First it was kickboxing, then barbells, then running.

Bream didn’t just push herself in the gym. As soon as her alarm went off each morning at 6:30, she would repeat positive affirmations aloud. “You are beautiful just the way you are,” she’d mumble. Some mornings those words didn’t sound true. But the more goals she reached in the gym, the easier it became to believe them.

Today Bream is a coach and manager at the Title Boxing Club in Nashville where she first learned to box. She was initially hesitant when the owner offered her the job. “If you want your life to change, you gotta change,” he told her. “You’ve got to take a leap of faith.”

“A hop of faith,” she joked back.

—Abi Churchill studies journalism at Patrick Henry College

WORLD has updated this story to clarify Amy Bream’s current age.