About Beach Mobility Rentals

At Beach Mobility Rentals, we serve the disabled community of all ages with beach wheelchairs! Our renters include anyone with a reduced ability to walk on uneven, soft, or unstable terrain such as sand, deep grass, and dirt. You need not miss limbs or suffer paralysis to qualify to use our chairs. Arthritis sufferers, people with temporary injuries (leg in a cast?), rehabilitation patients, people suffering with long term disabilities such as MS and ALS, and more all “qualify” to use the chairs. We don’t rent to people who have full normal functional use of their body. These beach wheel chairs are not a recreational toy and our business serves the people who need us most. We serve the disabled who have just as much right to enjoy their day in the sun as those who no affliction. We exist to serve a need, to enrich life, and to make our corner of the world a bit better for everyone.

From the Founder of Beach Mobility, Greg McNair

 

This update was written January 2020. Towards the end you’re going to learn that I became my own client. Read on, and you’ll see “the rest of the story.”

(Sept 2015) Over the last 49 years, I’ve experienced quite a bit. I’m a father of five children.  I served my community as a sergeant in a sheriff’s office, I’ve worked as an executive VP in charge of 5 companies and thousands of people, and I supported my family as a self-employed professional aerial photographer. I learned a strong work ethic from a hard working self-employed father, and an equally strong volunteer/service-to-others ethic from my mother. This is a perfect recipe for a life destined to being self-employed in the service to others. Little did I know, the perfect storm was brewing for these 45 years.

Most people see rites of passage and milestones in life experiences such as turning 16 and 21, getting married, perhaps landing that awesome career job. Mine was pretty simple: I couldn’t wait to get a resident beach parking pass for my truck. That signified I had arrived at the top of my bucket list–living close enough to the beach to warrant such a thing. As an inland resident for 45 years who longed to live coastal, you can see why this was important to me.

My dream has been to live so close to the beach I could watch a sunrise from the sand, ride my bike on it in the afternoons, or enjoy a day in the sun without having to drive 4 hours. And because of my work ethic, I knew I’d always want (not have) to work. If I could find a way to have a beach life and work through serving others, I’d be what I’d call “functionally retired.” In October of 2015, through a series of life changing events and complete providence in the “people intersections” God laid out for me, I got what I wished for.

Following a very stressful work season, the realization that money, greed, and pursuit of material things was crippling people around me, changing them as humans, it began to affect me. One morning I reached my tipping point at the office and sent my letter of resignation. I leapt off a very tall cliff, and pulled a rip cord hoping the chute worked. Thankfully it did. I spent a summer working with disabled in the community as I helped to grow a product segment with a beach wheelchair manufacturer in my hometown of Birmingham Alabama. I met a man (Jerry) responsible for stumbling into the need for the beach wheelchair through his hell-on-earth affliction of ALS. He was normal for his entire life, right up until the disease stripped him of his ability to pursue his passion for salt water fishing. I learned more from this man in my silent observation of his daily routine than any ice bucket challenge could have ever done for bringing awareness to the disease. Moreover, it brought me to the awareness of the saying: there but for the grace of God. The storm clouds were churning from multiple directions.

Shortly after meeting Jerry, I volunteered my time one hot July weekend in Jacksonville Florida helping disabled surfers through a program called Life Rolls On. This day changed me fundamentally as a person. As I write these words recalling the day, the tears are flowing. I met a man my age who had been paralyzed from slipping off his one-step high deck. I met a 15 year old boy who went to sleep totally normal, and woke the next morning with no use of his legs–a mystery that doctors will likely never solve. I met a medically retired NFL football player who lost use of his legs following a horrific shooting. And I met the founder of LRO Jesse Billauer, who suffers paralysis from a surfing accident in Southern California. And throughout the day, the same phrase resonated within me–there but for the grace of God. I also realized I had the same thing in common with every person on the beach that day: we were all there because we love God’s gift of sand, sun, and salt water. The hook was so firmly set that I knew my destiny. And the storm winds were beginning to pick up greater strength.

My mother had lived in Ormond Beach Florida for almost 24 years. As much as I loved the crystal blue waters and powder white sand of the Gulf Coast, there was something special about the crashing waves found in the Atlantic. My mother calls it Polynesian Paralysis. I agree. During my due diligence trip to Ormond and Daytona, where I recognized an obvious void of beach wheelchairs, I experienced yet more undeniable providential intersections. One afternoon while driving a powered wheelchair on the beach, two ladies chased me down to inquire where they could rent a chair like mine. You see, their sister was trapped on the pool deck like so many others with disabilities, because her wheelchair couldn’t handle the sand. I explained I was not disabled, and why I was there.  I promptly drove to the pool deck, met Diana, and transferred her into my chair. As she drove away, tears streaming down her own face, her crying sisters thanked me, for I probably “didn’t know the full extent of what I had just done.” Through my own tears, I explained they didn’t know what this had just done for me. It vindicated that I was right where I was meant to be. Somehow without me realizing, Diana had managed to circle back to us, and before I knew it, I was holding their hands in a circle of prayer. I fell to my knees and found myself eye level at Diana’s feet, my face purging every tear and drop of sweat in my head straight to the hot sand below. I looked to my left and was suddenly and fully aware that I was serving eye level at the feet of the person who needed me the most, and I knew without question, this is my calling, and I’m precisely where I am supposed to be. The storm dumped every once of energy directly in my lap. It had finally arrived in full force.

I begin my day with a new light, ready to reflect it, as I ask God the same question: please be very clear and show me how to serve others through you today, and I learned to ask Him to bring me closer to Him as well. He hasn’t let me down yet. I started a beach wheelchair rental service, and my goal is to serve every coast I can possibly reach. And now, I manufacture the chairs, which is the next great chapter of this adventure!

Through the summer of change, I’ve come to the realization that so many others are living with circumstances they believe they can’t handle. God will always give us more than we can handle, but never more than HE can handle. Why is this? He wants us to lean into Him. The truth is, place your worries and fears in God’s hands, and watch what He does for you. I have several close friends to thank for being able to realize, understand, and honestly believe and embrace this truth. Don’t ever forget to jump in the rain puddles created during storms in your life, to squeeze the wet sand between your toes, and to embrace what you have today, for tomorrow it could be gone. If you can’t see yourself jumping in puddles because your shoes are too expensive, learn how to acquire shoes you can get wet. Life is too short.

Now here’s the edit that will tell you “the rest of the story.”

(March 2021)

On Dec 3 2019, at 7am, my then-fiancé and I were enjoying a cup of coffee. I felt the world spin, so I tried to make it to the bathroom. Straight to the floor I went, and within the next 2hrs, we learned in the ER that I suffered a stroke in my right cerebellum and brain stem that I later learned should have killed me. That’s correct—young at 49 and a brain stroke. Now I am my own client, and believe me, I can relate to many many many of you. I looked left; I looked right; and never thought to look up when figuratively crossing a street. I got hit out of the blue like an airplane falling from the sky. A lot of things went into this happening, but we still don’t know exactly why. (But God does). As I asked myself, God, and my fiancé LauraLee why this happened to me, our pastor (and LauraLee) were quick to say a lesser man wouldn’t survive it. A lesser man wouldn’t be able to help others.  She believed in me so much that we moved up our wedding date by 3 months and married in what I now believe is the most expensive wedding in the history of anyone I know. We said “I do” in the Advent Hospital chapel 3 days following the stroke. I spent my bachelor party with a doc, an attending surgical assistant, and a monitor sales rep. We spent our honeymoon lying next to each other in the smallest bed we could imagine; me plugged in both arms to buzzing machines. One day we’ll get the honeymoon we deserve. And let this be a lesson to everyone who is uninsured as I was! I have a hefty bill ahead of me. I never saw that coming either. Find a way to prepare yourself please. Advent Hospital was fantastic to me, and it was practically like turning the H into Hotel. They were angelic.

3 months after my stroke, my beloved mother passed. As a virus was finding its way around the world scaring people and wreaking havoc, I was in my own world, consumed with recovery, and watching my mother live her last days. They were beautiful, special, and I am forever grateful of the opportunity to move to FL 6 years ago to be near her. So while BMR operations were affected by all of this, we still got through it all, and my family and I are closer to God now than we ever were.

I will spend my days recovering, still serving, being a family man, and doing my best to be a guide and light. As I recover I ask you to do one thing please: keep the caregivers in as much prayer as you do the physical victims you know. Nobody seems to remember what the caregiver goes through. As a victim, I forget that—a lot. And it’s not that I don’t care, because I do. I just forget that part easier. Sometimes I have half a mind to…wait…I do only have half a mind. Or maybe 2/3 of a mind. That’s ok, I’m going to use what’s left to do my best. God bless. Hope to see you soon!

(Pardon the use of the word “I” so frequently. You must understand, I Am Second. God and others are first. This is my personal meaning of life.)

Greg McNair
Founder, Beach Mobility Rentals and Beach Mobility Manufacturing