Doubt and Meaning - Christianity Today

The God I Love: A Lifetime of Walking with Jesus Joni Eareckson Tada Zondervan, 304 pages, $22.99

Making sense of God and suffering and a search for significance are at the heart of Joni Eareckson Tada’s poignant new memoir, which spans 53 years. A quadriplegic since a diving accident at 17, she writes vulnerably about her anger, doubts, deep depressions, and the difficulties of being disabled.

Yet the book never disintegrates into melancholia—it’s balanced with tales of her active life, her Joni and Friends ministry, and plenty of humor.

Eareckson Tada says her accident was part of God’s plan for her and has led her to walk “the harder yet richer path.” Her longing for physical healing finds resolution, 36 years after the accident, at the Pool of Bethesda in Old Jerusalem. There she acknowledges that the healing of her body is not as important as the healing of her soul: “I know I wouldn’t know you … I wouldn’t love and trust you … were it not for this wheelchair.”

Related Elsewhere

Joni Eareckson Tada is the founder and president of Joni and Friends, an organization accelerating Christian ministry in the disability community. For more Information, see Stemcellresearch.org.

The God I Love is available at Christianbook.com and other retailers. An excerpt of the book is available on the Zondervan website.

Previous Christianity Today articles about or by Tada include:

The Threat of Biotech Joni | Eareckson Tada responds to Christopher Reeve and others.

Undaunted | Bioethics challenges are huge. But so is God. (July 31, 2002)

A Surgeon’s View of Divine Healing | Do doctors waste their time by doing slowly and painstakingly what could have been done in the twinkling of an eye? (November 25, 1983)

Tada has been outspoken about science and bioethics. Christianity Today’s Life Ethics archive and sister publication Books & Culture’s Science Pages have more perspective on bioethics. For current news on stem-cell research and cloning, see Yahoo full coverage.