Joni Eareckson Tada’s story has become legend: On July 30, 1967, the athletic 17-year-old dived into the Chesapeake Bay, striking a submerged rock, crushing her spine. Instantly, she was a quadriplegic.
In the preface of her book Joni, written almost eight years after the accident, she wrote, “I have found that God knows my needs infinitely better than I know them. And he is utterly dependable, no matter which direction our circumstances take us.”
Little could she know which direction God would take her. Today, twenty-eight years after her accident, Joni is a painter, writer, singer, speaker, advocate, executive, and Christian leader. She heads JAF Ministries, a parachurch organization located in Agoura Hills, California, that advocates the cause of, and ministers to, those with disabilities.
From her first book Joni to her recent release Heaven, Joni has grappled with the inexorable issues of purpose in pain and suffering. In Joni, she declared, “Pain and suffering have purpose.” A few years later in One Step Further, she admitted, “While [suffering] is God’s choicest tool to mold our character, it also has the tendency to breed self-centeredness.”
Only someone who has suffered greatly and cares deeply about ministering to others could write that honestly. Leadership associate editor Dave Goetz asked Joni how she meets the needs of others when life hasn’t met hers.
Dave: You’ve faced a great deal of pain. Does it ever subside to a point that you stop being conscious of it?
Joni: I don’t want to sound morbid, but I think life is supposed to be difficult. A lot of life is grabbing your leg by the calf, jerking it out of the earth, putting it down in front of you, and going onward.
With my disability, some days are easier than others. But for me, life is always difficult. These are issues I must face every single morning.
Every morning somebody has to give me a bath in bed, dress me, lift me into a wheel-chair, comb my hair, brush my teeth, fix my breakfast, cut up my food, feed me.
When it comes to the day-to-day routines of dealing with the paralysis, at worst, it’s depressing; at best, it’s boring. I can’t live with those flat facts. I have to turn them, by God’s grace, into something that has meaning and purpose.
Dave, would you give me a sip of my coffee?
Dave: I’m new at this, so you have to help me out.
Joni: That’s okay. Are you married? Do you have kids?
Dave: I’m married but have no children.
Joni: This will give you practice for the kids. (Sips coffee) Thank you.
Dave: When life gets hard, one thing that may wane is the desire to reach out to others. How do you continue to reach outside yourself?
Joni: The woman who helps me each morning is going through some difficult times. When she tells me her struggles, I could say, “Snap out of it. I’ve been paralyzed for 28 years. You only think you’ve got problems.”
But I need to look at her needs rather than my own. How can I bless her today? How can I be the balm of Gilead where she’s hurting? I must ask, “Out of my weakness, Lord God, would you please give me strength to minister to her.”
So we pray together and sing hymns together. We’ve stopped in the bathroom in between her brushing my teeth and combing my hair, and recited four stanzas of “May Jesus Christ Be Praised.”
These kinds of small, drastic steps of obedience become, miraculously, a blessing in her life and a strength to me.
Dave: What does it take to move beyond a limitation?
Joni: In a way, I’m somewhat blessed by my circumstances because I’m forced to lean on God whether I like it or not. My choices are limited. Let me give an example—and this truly is the fuel that fires all my days:
For the most part, I have to be in bed by eight o’clock at night because of my physical condition. I used to hate that, because when I’m lying in bed paralyzed, gravity is my enemy; I’m more limited than when I’m sitting in a wheelchair. At least in a wheelchair, I’ve got shoulder muscles and biceps. But lying in bed, I can’t move at all. It used to be so frightening and made me feel so claustrophobic. I couldn’t move except to turn my head on the pillow. It really was a bed of affliction for me.
Some years ago, somebody put a plaque by my bedside that reads BE still and know that I am God. I looked at that verse and thought, Well, here I am being still, physically. Maybe these are the structural boundaries that God is placing on me and pushing against me that I might see some other kind of stillness that is deeper. I decided that if I’m to believe God at his Word, and if he is with me in the pit of hell, then there’s something far more beautiful that can come out of these ashes than I can possibly imagine.
Now, many years later, it’s not a bed of affliction any more. It’s become an altar of praise. This physical enforcement of stillness causes something in my life that wouldn’t happen if I were on my feet running around. Perhaps I’d be putting the third kid to bed or folding the second load of laundry or emptying the dish-washer. But I wouldn’t be praying.
Dave: So it’s when we can’t free ourselves from a situation that we discover what God is teaching us?
Joni: It’s the old adage of Job—”God has hedged me in.” The hedges were thorny and thick and high, and there was no escape, no way out. The only place Job could look was up. I used to look at the four walls of my bedroom at night and say, “The hedge forces me in bed, which confines me, but, nevertheless, it makes me look up.”
I love the verse that speaks of the love of God “constraining” me. The word constrain means “to press in on all sides so as to impel forward.” You press something in, in order to push it forward. It’s the same with the limitations of my disability—they’re constraining, but it’s all to push me forward.
Dave: What can prevent you from seeing suffering this way?
Joni: So much of the battle is in our thoughts. The other night I was reading in Psalm 119 about keeping my eyes from looking at worthless things. There are so many things we look at that are just worthless. So many times we let our minds wander. Undisciplined, furtive thoughts that we allow to nest in our heads build strongholds in our thinking.
Forgive me for speaking so informally, but many men don’t want to talk about their thought life or let it be exposed because it is shaming; it reveals too much of who they are on the inside. I can identify with that because my world is the world of my thoughts. If I don’t watch it, I can live in fantasies.
For example, we spend too much time in an introspective way about the sermon we preached on Sunday, thinking, I should have said this. Why did I say that? How come no one’s complimenting me?
Thoughts like that consume too much of our time. It orients us toward self—self-appreciation, self-absorption, self-consciousness, self-awareness, self-gratification. The self becomes the rule. That sets us up for defeat.
Dave: How much should we think of our own needs as we minister?
Joni: I think God places in the sphere of our ministry those special people who can “meet that need.” However, I’m not big into focusing on needs. I get impatient with people who want to get their needs met. It’s indicative of our culture.
Recently I went to a women’s retreat and listened to a marvelous missionary speaker, a woman who had served in the jungles of an equatorial country for almost forty years. She had a somewhat dowdy appearance; she wasn’t dressed in the latest styles. Her hairdo was a little out of fashion, and she was not a particularly polished speaker. She shuffled her notes a few times and looked for a couple of quotes she’d lost in her notebook. She spoke quietly and humbly.
But I was so invigorated and challenged. She told stories of her and her husband taking their small children into jungles where malaria was running rampant, where rivers were infested with crocodiles, where the monsoon rains came down, and where their tiny grass hut, up on twenty-foot pilings of bamboo, was shaking in the wind. The natives they were trying to reach were cannibals who practiced head-hunting.
The fact that she wasn’t a polished speaker made her stories and testimonies and insights from God’s Word all the more brilliant. They shined with a kind of unpolished shekinah glory. Her speaking was so unmanmade, so divine.
Near the end of the retreat, I had lunch with several of the women. One said, “I couldn’t relate to the speaker. My life is about carpooling, children, and laundry. I came to this retreat tired and exhausted, hoping my needs would be met. I’m sorry; my needs are not getting met.”
I wanted to say to her, but didn’t, “What is your problem of too many kids crowding in your van on your carpool day compared to a river full of crocodiles?” I thought, Have we lost the ability to translate another’s testimony into our own experience? Can we not rely on the Word of God or the Spirit of God to enable us to look at somebody through the light of his grace and to see character, perseverance, self-control, self-discipline, a desire to obey—all these things that ought to be easily applied to our lives?
I never got married to get my needs met. My husband does not exist to meet my needs. I exist to meet his needs. And, incidentally, while I’m doing that, a couple of my needs might get met. Surprise, surprise. That is the joy, I think, of being married. It’s also the joy of ministering.
Dave: What has helped you maintain that perspective?
Joni: A portion of Scripture that guides me constantly is 2 Peter 3:8, where Peter says, “To the Lord, a thousand years are as a day, and a day is as a thousand years.”
I believe that every moment is an opportunity to be seized. Each day is as a thousand years; our twenty-four-hour slice of time is a sunrise-to-sunset opportunity for us to do something, by the grace of God, that counts for eternity, multiplying out to more than a thousand years.
I’m not saying that every moment, every day here equals a thousand years there. The proportions are what I think Peter was trying to get across: that this is how sacred, how valuable, how sanctified our moments really are.
Our days are short—a couple of score and ten. Everything we do here has a direct bearing on what’s going to happen there. When you think about it, it makes you not want to waste your moments but to redeem the time, to seize the opportunity.
A French mystic of the seventeenth century said that God does not give us time in which to do nothing. There is no such thing as empty time. Now, certainly there must be times of rest and respite, in which you go before the Lord in solitude. But even our meditation has a beautiful purpose—not utilitarian, in that it is something to be used—a sweet repose in which those moments of rest benefit the soul and end up glorifying God.
I don’t think this is a burdensome yoke to bear; it is easy and light, because it makes our work meaningful. It makes our suffering purposeful. It doesn’t mean you’re any less busy—it may mean you’re more busy. But the load is lightened knowing that this translates out to eternity—in your life, in another’s life, and for the glory of God.
Dave: What would it mean for us to embrace fully our allotted suffering in this life?
Joni: I don’t know. I’m just finishing Jonathan Edwards’s Religious Affections, a classic that I read every five years or so because I need that plumb line. Reading Edwards helps me ground my perceptions, making certain I see everything through the lens of God’s Word. I know that my suffering is “successful” when I am faithful to Christ in it. I’m choosing to be obedient, even if it’s a drastic, small obedience that goes against the grain of my nature. To be faithful to him, even when there are no evidences of joy or peace or blessing or camaraderie of spirit with other Christians, is the measure of success.
Recently my pastor and I were reminding each other how grateful we are that when we go to be with the Lord Jesus, he’s going to say, “Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things. I will put you in charge of many things.”
How incredible that is—God thinks exponentially! If we’ve been faithful in a teeny, tiny small matter, then God uses not arithmetic but trigonometry; he multiplies it a hundredfold. How good of God to do that based not on our success but our faithfulness and our mission. God will never do a cost-effective analysis of our ministry.
Our ability to persevere, to be like a fox terrier that grabs a bone and won’t let go until the Lord blesses—that is the true measure of success. We must decide to stick it out, to screw our feet down into the bolts of the earth, and not to let the world’s criteria of success be our standard of measurement.
Dave: Do you spend much time thinking about the future?
Joni: I get frightened thinking about another thirty years in a wheelchair. This sounds trite, but I can take only one day at a time—grace only for today, manna fresh for this moment. I’ve got to quit worrying that a year from now my lungs might give out, that in five years my husband might not be able to take care of me and I’ll have to go to a long-term care facility.
It’s overwhelming to think that until I die, I’m always going to be in a wheelchair. I’ve got to hold on to God’s Word. Christ says seven times in Matthew, chapter 6, not to worry about tomorrow, so by gum, I will not worry about tomorrow. I will trust that his grace will be sufficient for today. There’s no grace available for tomorrow or next week or next month; it is new and fresh only every morning.
That’s the way I must live—in the power of God’s Spirit, day by day.
Dave: How do you resolve the tension between ministering here to your fullest but still looking forward to heaven?
Joni: Sometimes life is so hard for me that I would rather disappear. I’m not talking about suicidal thoughts. But I have days when I think, I’ve written a bunch of books. I’ve encouraged people. God, you’ve used my wheelchair. My life has had an impact on a few people. Can I go home now? Please, can I come home now? I’m tired of struggling with sin. I’m tired of prying the world’s suction cups off my heart.
But time and again, the Holy Spirit impresses upon me that verse in Philippians in which the apostle Paul says, “For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain. … I desire to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far; but it is more necessary for you that I remain in the body.”
The only thing holding Paul down to earth was those to whom he was ministering.
It is better for the woman who bathes and dresses me every morning. It is better that I stay and impress upon her the balm of Gilead, soothing her heart, touching her where her hurt is. It’s better for her that I remain.
That’s the whole answer to the struggle of being here and not quite there—one foot down in the mud of earth, one foot in heaven. Our heart constantly wants to yank this foot out of earth and get it up there with the other one where it belongs.
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Would you like to talk with Joni about ministering when life gets hard? She will lead a live, online discussion on Monday, February 19, at 8:00 P.M. (Central Time). In America Online, type the keywords “CO Live.” To enroll in Christianity Online, call 1-800-413-9747, ext. 174021.
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1996 Christianity Today/LEADERSHIP Journal
