.........................................................................................
Joni Eareckson Tada
“God, if You won’t let me die, then show me
how to live.”
More than inspirational
Joni Eareckson
Tada’s half-century as a quadriplegic and a disabilities advocate is far more
than a story of human endurance.
It’s a
Christ-exalting example of a courageous truth Christians don’t always embrace: ‘When I am weak, then I am strong’
by Jamie
Dean
AGOURA HILLS, Calif. — In
the midnight darkness of a Baltimore hospital in 1967, Joni Eareckson begged
God to heal her.
Weeks
earlier, the 17-year-old girl had broken her neck after diving into unexpectedly
shallow waters in the Chesapeake Bay.
The result: paralysis from the
shoulders down.
The teenager endured grueling
surgery and lay strapped onto a Stryker frame designed to allow nurses to turn
patients with spinal cord injuries. Her weight dropped to 80 pounds. One friend
sobbed at the sight.
But Joni had grown up in
church, and she hoped that God was teaching her a dramatic lesson before
healing her quadriplegia. At night, in her hospital bed, Joni would imagine
herself at the Pool of Bethesda.
In the account from John 5, a
man disabled for 38 years waits at a pool for someone to dip him into healing
waters. Jesus passes by and heals him. The man gets up and walks.
Joni
imagined herself at the pool and sang a hymn she learned as a child: “Savior, Savior, hear my humble cry. While
on others Thou art calling, do not pass me by.”
Joni never walked again.
Her permanent paralysis — including
losing the use of her hands — led to a battle with depression and doubts about
God’s goodness.
Why would He leave her this
way? What kind of Savior doesn’t heal a paralyzed girl who cries out to Him?
Fifty
years later, Joni’s answer is jubilant: “It
sounds incredible, but I really would rather be in this wheelchair knowing
Jesus as I do than be on my feet without Him.”
She
celebrates “that glorious but awful,
beautiful but sad, terrible but wonderful day I broke my neck — because look
what God has done.”
Joni came to embrace God’s
sovereignty in her suffering, and she founded a ministry that has helped
hundreds of thousands of people with disabilities in the United States and
around the world.
She’s written dozens of books
and spoken out against abortion and euthanasia. And she’s done it all without
cultivating a superhero persona.
Indeed, Joni openly talks about
her weaknesses, her battle with chronic pain, and her dependence on God’s grace
for getting out of bed each day — with joy.
For 50 years of exalting Christ
in suffering and offering compassionate help and gospel-based hope to the
needy, the weak, and the vulnerable, Joni Eareckson Tada is WORLD’s 2017 Daniel
of the Year.
Spend a little time with Joni,
and you’ll begin to discover a central truth about her extraordinary life: It’s
fueled by ordinary rhythms of Christian living.
On a summer Sunday morning at
Church in the Canyon (PCA) in Calabasas, Calif., Joni and Ken Tada, her husband
of 35 years, sat near their usual spot at the front-left of the small church
they’ve attended for more than two decades. Joni chatted with friends.
Ken helped an elderly couple
navigating the aisle on walkers. A few minutes earlier, Joni had asked Ken for
a favor in the parking lot: Would he please adjust her corset?
She wears the surgical binder
to help her sit up straight and take deeper breaths. Fifty years in a
wheelchair — and chemotherapy for breast cancer in 2010 — wears on bones and
body and has led to scoliosis and a displaced hip that cause chronic, sometimes
severe pain.
But adjustments help, and Joni
was cheerful as worship began. The service wasn’t flashy, but the content was
rich and Biblical.
Pastor
Bob Bjerkaas talked about Christ’s sympathy in our suffering and pointed out
that Jesus prayed the Father would spare Him from crucifixion: “Jesus Christ knew what it was to
desperately want an experience to be removed from His biography.”
So did Joni.
After her accident, she faced a
litany of what-ifs: What if she hadn’t gone swimming that day? What if her
tennis date hadn’t canceled? What if she hadn’t jumped in head-first?
She begged a friend to kill
her, and despaired she couldn’t do it herself. Eventually, she turned to hopes
of miraculous healing and attended an event in Washington, D.C., led by
purported faith healer Kathryn Kuhlman.
Ushers packed people with
disabilities into a wheelchair section, and Kuhlman never approached them.
Before the service ended, they herded Joni and others in wheelchairs back to an
elevator. She felt disappointed and bitter.
Finally, Joni prayed: “God, if You won’t let me die, then show me
how to live.”
She’d sit for hours with a
Bible on a music stand, turning the pages of Scripture with her mouth-stick.
Friends joined her for Bible
studies around her family’s large farm table, and they read books about God’s
sovereignty by authors like J.I. Packer, Martyn Lloyd-Jones, and J. Gresham
Machen.
“We just delighted that this accident
wasn’t a mistake,” she says.
Not only was it not a mistake —
Joni learned God uses suffering to make people more like Christ and to know Him
more deeply.
Indeed, He used the suffering
of His own Son to accomplish salvation for sinners. Joni’s deepest need for
healing was spiritual, not physical.
Her friend, Steve Estes,
crystallized this truth in 10 words Joni still repeats often: “God permits what He hates to accomplish what
He loves.”
It was a life-altering
realization: God was fully in control, and He could use her suffering for good
in her life and the lives of others.
From her farm table in
Maryland, Joni had no idea how many others that would include.
DURING HER REHABILITATION, Joni
had learned to paint holding a brush in her mouth. She showed pieces at a local
venue and appeared on the Today show.
Her autobiography (with more
than 5 million copies sold) was made into a movie, and she joined Pastor Billy
Graham at 12 evangelistic crusades.
She
moved to California in 1979 and started the ministry Joni and Friends in a
one-room office in Burbank.
She
later served on the National Council on Disability that worked on the Americans
with Disabilities Act signed into law by President George H.W. Bush in 1990.
When
actors and activists pushed for embryonic stem cell research to help people
with paralysis, Joni advocated using adult stem cells, which were already
yielding scientific successes and didn’t involve destroying embryos.
(She also worked with President
George W. Bush’s administration on ethical stem cell use.)
She
spoke out for Terri Schiavo, a disabled Florida woman whose husband had
successfully persuaded courts to allow doctors to remove her feeding tube,
despite her parents’ pleas that their daughter was still interactive and
viable.
On Larry King Live, Joni
warned against a mentality of “better off dead than disabled.”
That
extends to the unborn, and Joni has lamented abortions targeting unborn
children with disabilities like Down syndrome.
She grieved California becoming
the fourth state to legalize assisted suicide and noted if euthanasia had been
legal in 1967, she might not be here today.
Meanwhile,
Joni and Friends (JAF) grew: The ministry started dozens of summer camps for
people with disabilities and their families. Volunteers assigned to each camper
give caretakers a much-needed respite.
JAF
affiliates help local churches consider how to help special needs families on
an ongoing basis and encourage even the smallest churches to offer a welcoming
environment for people with needs.
The
ministry also launched Wheels for the World — a program that delivers
wheelchairs to people with disabilities in developing countries.
The 100,000th chair went to a
boy in Uganda crippled in his legs and feet. His single mother couldn’t afford
a wheelchair, and the little boy — named Ebenezer — had spent years dragging
himself in the dirt.
In a
poignant twist, inmates at 16 prisons across the United States help refurbish
wheelchairs for the program.
In workshops filled with
hammers and hardware, prisoners broken by their own sin and the sins of others
restore broken wheelchairs for people with broken bodies.
Back at
the worship service at Church in the Canyon, the congregation remembered the
broken body of Christ. Three men passed gold plates filled with small communion
wafers.
Ken
reached up to place a wafer in Joni’s mouth, as the pastor recited Jesus’
words: “This is my body, broken for you.”
After
communion, Joni’s voice rang out as the congregation sang a hymn she often sang
after her accident: “Be still my soul,
thy Jesus can repay from His own fullness all He takes away.”
FIFTY
YEARS AFTER HER ACCIDENT, Joni dwells on fullness, not
loss.
During
an afternoon tour of the couple’s modest home that Joni bought when she first
moved to California, she points to her father’s Western-themed painting hanging
over the mantel.
It reminds her of learning to
paint, as her father put her hand on his to hold a brush when she was a young
girl.
Across the
living room, a vibrant pencil sketching of a horse in full stride reminds her
of learning to adapt her artistic skills after her accident. (She says she’s
“left-mouthed” and can’t draw a thing with the right side.)
Photos
on the walls show her three sisters, her family farm, and Joni and Ken on
ministry trips in places like Cuba and Moscow. The couple met at Grace
Community Church in 1980, and Joni has laughed when she’s recounted their first
date.
She was nervous during dinner
and drank too much water at the restaurant. She realized the bag attached to
her indwelling catheter was perilously full.
Ken was
unfazed, emptying the bag next to a tree outside and singing a little song: “Where Joni goes, nothing grows.”
The couple married in 1982,
after dismissing un-Biblical suggestions they should go away for a weekend
together before marrying.
Joni jokes their honeymoon was
a bit like “handicap awareness week,” but
she’s thankful for their shared commitment to Christ. That hasn’t meant
marriage is always easy.
Early on, Joni struggled with
patience at times, and Ken sometimes struggled with depression under the weight
of helping to care for Joni and also teach high school full time for 32 years.
Joni has a small team of women
who help her get up in the morning (she calls them her “get-up girls”), and the
couple worked through their struggles with prayer and Scripture.
They’ve traveled the world (and
the United States), and Ken still travels with international teams to deliver
wheelchairs, and he works in the ministry.
At their dining room table, Ken
says Joni’s 2010 battle with stage 3 breast cancer brought them even closer: “I realized I could lose my best friend.”
Chemotherapy and a mastectomy
were grueling and weakened Joni’s already frail bones. Her doctor declared her
cancer-free in 2015, but pain persists from other problems with her bones.
In a private Facebook group,
she corresponds with others who face severe pain.
One
woman described her own pain as “something
inside me pulling my ribs one way and pushing my spine the other.”
“I read that,” Joni
says, “and I thought: ‘That’s exactly
it.’”
She’s careful with pain
medications and laments the country’s overwhelming opioid epidemic.
She’s
found anxiety makes her pain worse, so she often prays or sings hymns when
she’s dealing with it: “To know that
Christ’s grace is available — it won’t take away the pain, but it will give you
the courage to face it.”
Joni recounts a particularly
painful day and how Ken drew a “C” on a Post-it note and stuck it to her shirt.
He told her he could see the courage of Christ in her eyes.
At the
dining room table, Ken opens his wallet and pulls out a spare Post-it with a
“C.” He smiles at his wife: “I still
carry one in case you need it.”
PAIN IS
A CONSTANT chord in Joni’s life, but it isn’t the dominant note.
On a van ride to a screening of
the newly digitized version of the Joni movie
at a local church, Joni sits with her wheelchair secured with clamps to bolts
on the floor: “What should we sing?”
She sometimes has to lean a
certain way to get enough air to sing, but that doesn’t stop her from
beginning: “O worship the King, all
glorious above, O gratefully sing, His power and His love.”
She wheels through the halls of
the event greeting people. “Oh happy
day,” she tells volunteers.
Even the details of the
accident seem to marvel her: Joni’s sister Kathy had been in the water that day
and stepped on a crab.
She turned around to warn Joni
and saw her sister floating facedown in the water. Kathy rescued her and
brought her to shore.
The menu at a prescreening
reception: crabcakes.
After the screening, Joni jokes
with the crowd and tells them she won’t make a sequel. “There will be no ‘Return of Joni,’” she says.
But she
grows serious when she explains how God used her accident to draw her closer to
Him, and she urges anyone in the audience who doesn’t know Christ to “lay your sin at the foot of the cross and
let God save you.”
On the way home, Ken, Joni, and
Kathy (who is in town visiting) talk about the people they saw. They pray and
thank God for His blessings.
They enjoy the full moon, and
the sisters remember how their parents loved to sing songs about the moon on
camping trips. (Both parents have died.)
At home, Joni rolls onto the
driveway, looks up at the night sky, and harmonizes with Kathy: “Shine on, shine on harvest moon, for me and
my gal.”
DESPITE THE 12-HOUR DAY, Joni
rolls into the headquarters of Joni and Friends at 10:00 the next morning.
She
goes right to work.
In her
office, Joni sits at a long desk next to Francie Lorey, an assistant who has
worked with her since the beginning, typing many of Joni’s books, articles, and
speeches.
They each sit at a computer
screen, and Joni dictates thank-you notes as Lorey types and the words appear
on both screens. (Joni has also learned to use dictation software, though it’s
a more laborious process.)
After a
couple of hours at the computer, another assistant feeds her lunch while she
keeps working.
After
lunch, she heads downstairs to meet a group of visitors who have just toured
the 34,000-square-foot building that houses JAF operations, including the
wheelchair program, a radio broadcast, resource materials for local churches
starting disability ministries, and a disabilities institute to train interns
who are interested in entering fields related to disabilities care.
The
staff also fields more than 700 pieces of correspondence each month. Joni says
the needs have expanded beyond questions about coping with disabilities.
Now emails and calls come from
people struggling with depression, divorce, abandonment, and all kinds of
suffering.
Joni’s
presence looms large in the ministry, but she doesn’t think the programs depend
on her to continue.
She doesn’t plan to retire but
knows she’s closer to the end of her ministry than the beginning.
At a recent family camp, she
says a group of teenage volunteers didn’t recognize her when she first arrived.
Joni was thrilled.
Does
she fear the future?
As she
ages, she sometimes fears her pain growing even worse. And she shudders to
think about the prospect of losing Ken, if he died first.
“But I’m not going to be fearful about what
I have no grace available for yet,” she says. “I’ve got to take a deep breath and trust my Savior will help me when
it comes time.”
In the
meantime, people still sometimes ask her if they can pray she’ll be healed. She
never turns them down.
But she also asks them to pray
she’ll have a holy heart more than a healed body. Her ultimate hope is in
heaven, where body and soul will be healed forever.
Until
then, she’s called suffering a form of sandblasting away her sin and drawing
her closer to Christ: “My displaced hip
and scoliosis are sheepdogs that constantly snap at my heels, driving me down
the road to Calvary, where I die to the sins Jesus died for.”
And she
often feels Christ is closest when she’s in pain. “I don’t know why, but it seems that God shows us the face of Jesus in
those moments,” she says.
“And those who refuse to enter suffering,
fearing there’s nothing there but darkness — they miss that.”
During
a tour of JAF, Shelby Donlon, 27, raises a hand during questions and answers.
Shelby was born with
arthrogryposis, a condition that included severe clubfeet. As a toddler,
doctors diagnosed her with developmental disabilities, and she also suffers from
epilepsy.
But
Shelby already knows Joni. She volunteers here at the ministry.
On this
afternoon, Shelby’s helped to the front in her wheelchair so Joni can hear her.
The two sit wheels-to-wheels, and Shelby’s voice breaks. “I just want to say that you are very strong and very special,” she
tells Joni.
Joni
smiles and thanks her, and then she adds: “But
I want you to know, Shelby, that I don’t feel strong. I feel like I’m the
weakest person in the world.”
She
describes her two-hour morning routine: A friend helps her with a bed bath,
toileting routines, legs exercises, dressing, fixing her hair, and brushing her
teeth.
Sometimes
when she wakes up, she feels she can’t do it another day: “I tell God: ‘I don’t have the strength for this. But You do. I can’t do
quadriplegia today. I can’t do it without You.”
God
always gives her the strength, she tells Shelby, and she’s learned to boast in
her weakness. She calls it “the Biblical
way to wake up in the morning.”
That’s something people with
disabilities can teach the church, she says: That dependence on Christ is the
only way to salvation, and embracing weakness leads us to Him.
She
takes a few more questions, and she doesn’t let the group go without singing a
verse from a famous hymn: “When we’ve
been there 10,000 years, bright shining as the sun, we’ve no less days to sing
God’s praise than when we’d first begun.”
DECADES
AFTER JONI FIRST IMAGINED herself at the Pool of
Bethesda, she visited the ancient ruins during a trip to Jerusalem with Ken.
It was a quiet afternoon. Tears
streamed down her face as she contemplated a beautiful truth: Jesus had not
passed her by.
“O Jesus, thank you for a ‘no’ answer to
physical healing,” she’s remembered praying.
“It’s meant that I’m depending more on Your
grace, it’s increasing my compassion for others who are hurt and disabled. … It has strengthened my hope of heaven,
and it’s made me love You so much more. … And I would not trade it for any amount
of walking.”
Joni
looks forward to the day she’ll walk again in the new heavens and the new
earth. She looks forward to kneeling too. For now, she asks those with able
bodies to do what she and others can’t do — yet.
“Kneel before the Lord God, your Maker and
mine,” she writes.
“And while you’re down there, if you feel
so inclined, thank Him for being so good to a paralyzed woman named Joni.”
Jamie Dean
Jamie
lives and works in North Carolina, where she covers the political beat and
other topics as national editor for WORLD Magazine. Follow Jamie on
Twitter @deanworldmag.
 |
Joni in
1964.
|
|
Joni
Eareckson Tada in her studio at the Joni and Friends offices.
|
|
Joni and
Ken deliver a wheelchair in El Salvador as part of the Wheels for the World
program.
|
 |
Joni
drawing in 1969.
|
|
Joni at a
family camp event.
|
No comments:
Post a Comment