From 2007 to 2019 I interviewed 200 prominent Christians in front of student audiences. My favorite all-time guest was Joni Eareckson Tada in 2012. Today CT is beginning a profile series named after Eugene Peterson’s classic book about discipleship. No one I know has a more wonderful record of “long obedience in the same direction” than Joni.
The bare facts of her life are well-known. At age 17 she misjudged the shallowness of the water and dove into the Chesapeake Bay. She has had quadriplegia for almost six decades. She has also written more than 48 books (mostly relying on voice-recognition software), painted beautifully with a brush between her teeth, and led Joni and Friends, an organization that among other things has provided more than 227,000 wheelchairs to those in need around the world.
For me, the most stunning part of the interview came when I asked Joni what she thought her life would have been like had she not broken her neck. Here’s what she said:
I believe what happened to me was an example of Hebrews 12 discipline. I do. I’ve had Christians ask, “How can you say that of God? That’s awful for you to say he would discipline you by making you a quadriplegic.” No, no, no. Read Hebrews 12: God disciplines those he loves. Had I not broken my neck, I’d probably be on my second divorce, maxing out my husband’s credit cards, planning my next ski vacation. I wouldn’t be here extolling the glories of the gospel and the power of God to help a person smile, not in spite of the problems but because of them.
But please read on. Her words are so lovely.
Do you still have flashbacks of the accident?
Absolutely. Some background for the people here: This was the dreadful moment when I took a dive and my head hit the bottom of the sandbar. That snapped my head back, crushing my spinal cord, leaving me face-down in the water. It’s a horrific image. Just think about it: if you were paralyzed totally, face-down in the water, and you hadn’t taken a deep breath. It’s so shockingly unthinkable. When I was first injured, I couldn’t even think about it because it was so overwhelming.
Peroxide in your hair saved your life?
Yes. The day before I had gone to the drugstore and picked up a bottle of Nice’n Easy midnight summer blond, and I peroxided my hair as 17-year-olds did back then. Had my hair not been shockingly blond, my sister Kathy would never have seen me face-down in the water. She told me later on, “Joni, you were a mousy blond, and that water was dark and murky. Only because of the peroxided hair did I even see you.” God sometimes uses the incidental choices we make to change our lives.
As you were lying in the hospital bed, did you have faith in God?
As a 14-year-old I had embraced Jesus as my Savior but had confused the abundant Christian life with the great American dream: I was a Christian and would lose weight, get good grades, get voted captain of the hockey team, go to college, marry a wonderful man who made $250,000 a year, and we’d have 2.5 children. It was me-focused: What can God do for me? I almost thought I had done God a great big favor by accepting Jesus. And to be frank, I had made some immoral choices. I finally got that boyfriend I was hoping would show up, but we were doing some things together that were wrong.
Did you feel that way at the time?
In April 1967, I came home from a sordid Friday-night date, threw myself onto my pillow, and cried, “Oh, God, I’m embarrassing you. I’m staining your reputation by saying I’m Christian yet doing one thing Friday night and another Sunday morning. I’m a hypocrite. I don’t want to live like this. I want you to change my life. I’m powerless to do it myself. Please do something in my life that will jerk it right-side up, because I’m making a mess of the Christian faith in my life, and I don’t want that. I want to glorify you.”
Then I had the diving accident about three months later. In the hospital I was thinking, Wait a minute. You took that prayer that seriously? God, I was disobedient, but I’m one of your children. How can you deal with your children so roughly? This is the way you answer prayer for a closer walk with you? You’ll never be trusted with another of my prayers.
Joni Eareckson Tada: Why Should I Fear Death?
As you lay in that hospital bed, did you have suicidal thoughts?
When first injured, I was overwhelmed with the prospect of being paralyzed for the rest of my life. I used to lie in bed and wrench my head back and forth violently on the pillow, hoping to break my neck up at some higher level and pass out. I was hoping that when I was strong enough to sit up in a wheelchair, they’d give me a power wheelchair so I could careen off a high curb and kill myself that way. But a person can only live with that kind of despair for so long. And thankfully, Christian friends of mine were praying.
Eventually God used those prayers to turn my despair Godward. It’s in the Psalms: Why are you downcast, O my soul? Put your trust in God (42:11). God began to bring back to my mind and memory those verses of Scripture that I had memorized.
When were you able to pray again with faith?
Finally, under the power of other people’s prayers and hints and whispers of the Word of God, I prayed one short prayer that changed my life: “Oh, God, if I can’t die, show me how to live.” That was probably the most powerful prayer I had ever prayed. My depression began to lift and the despair to dissipate.
That took time. If at that time there had been an assisted-suicide law, would you have asked someone to kill you?
Oh my goodness, yes. When I was depressed in the early part of my hospitalization, I begged my girlfriends to bring in their mothers’ sleeping pills, their fathers’ razors, anything. I’m grateful there was no physician-assisted-suicide law around back then. I would have tried very hard to mount some court challenge to change the definition of terminal illness so that it might include spinal cord injury. I would have done anything to put me out of my misery. I was so miserable.
What a different world we live in now, because there really are people with disabilities trying to change the court definitions of terminal illness in states like Oregon and Washington. At our ministry we’re working hard to prevent that from happening and to give hope in Christ so these people, like me, will find a way out of depression.
Does depression still ensnare you at times?
Are you happy? I make myself be happy. I make myself sing, because I have to. The alternative is too frightening. My girlfriends will tell you: In the morning when I wake up, I know they’ll be coming into my bedroom to give me a bed bath, do my toileting routines, pull up my pants, put me in the wheelchair, feed me breakfast, and push me out the front door.
I lie there thinking, Oh God, I cannot face this. I’m so tired of this routine. My hip is killing me. I’m so weary. I don’t know how I’m going to make it to lunchtime. I have no energy for this day. God, I can’t do quadriplegia. But I can do all things through you as you strengthen me. So, God, I have no smile for these girlfriends of mine who are going to come in here with a happy face. Can I please borrow your smile? I need it desperately. I need you.
I hate the prospect of having to face the day with paralysis. I choose the Holy Spirit’s help because I don’t want to go down that grim, dark path to depression anymore.
That’s the biblical way to wake up in the morning, the only way to wake up in the morning. No wonder the apostle Paul said, Boast in your afflictions. Don’t be ashamed of them. Don’t think you have to hide them and gussy yourself up before God in the morning so that he’ll be happy with you and see that you’re really believing in him. No, no, no. Admit you can’t do this thing called life. Then cast yourself at the mercy of God and let him show up through your weakness because that’s what he promises—2 Corinthians 12:9.
Who are the people with handicaps?
Maybe the really handicapped people are the ones who wake up in the morning, hit the alarm, take a quick shower, scarf down breakfast, give God a speedy tip-of-a-hat of a quiet time, and then zoom out the door on automatic cruise control. Like, “I accepted you as my Savior, Jesus, way back when. I put my sins on the counter in exchange for an asbestos-lined soul. I got this Christian thing figured out. I’ll check in with you now and then, but I can pretty much do it on my own.” God says if you live this way he’s against you. James 4:6—he’s against the proud, those who’ve got it all figured out, but he gives grace to the humble.
The humble are …
People who wake up in the morning knowing they can’t do this thing called life without the divine help of the Savior. That makes my disability such an advantage. I’m so blessed to have it force me into the arms of Christ every morning, because I know my human inclination is not to go to the Cross every morning. It’s to turn my head on the pillow and pull the covers up and not face the day.
What you’re saying about hard mercy makes a lot of sense to Christians—but what about non-Christians who ask you to put together a good God with terrible occurrences? How do you talk with them about God’s sovereignty in your personal situation?
Always with what the Bible calls reasonable sweetness, savoring my conversation with salt. I get into an elevator with a bunch of people who see the lady in the wheelchair smiling and humming “Amazing Grace.” They can connect the dots: lady in wheelchair singing “Amazing Grace.” It’s a compelling support for the gospel. If people want to get into discussion with me about the sovereignty of God, I will tell them front and center that God doesn’t like spinal cord injury. He takes no pleasure in multiple sclerosis or children born with spina bifida.
John Piper talks about how God looks at suffering through two lenses. He looks at the isolated incident of suffering through a narrow lens and loathes it. His heart loathes it when you go through a divorce. His heart aches when you give birth to that child with multiple disabilities. He hates the isolated lens of suffering. But he delights in the wide-angle lens. He sees the mosaic. He sees how it all fits together into this incredible pattern for not only our good but the good of all those around us, and for his glory.
I’m grateful that God is sovereign. His fingers hold back a deluge of evil in this world. I’m grateful that he only allows to slip through his sovereign fingers that which he’s convinced will help our souls and fit us better for eternity.
What about those who are suddenly murdered and don’t have the opportunity to learn as you learned?
It’s impossible to conjecture what is in God’s heart. The Bible calls suffering a mystery for good reason. Our thoughts are not God’s thoughts. We can’t see the big picture. Why doesn’t God just eradicate suffering all together? If he were to eradicate suffering, he’d have to eradicate sin, in which suffering has its roots. And if he were to eradicate sin, he’d have to eradicate sinners.
Jesus could have not only established the kingdom at the cross, but he could have fulfilled it right then and there. He could have ushered in the completion of the kingdom of God. Bang. Close the curtain on sin and suffering and Satan. Send them all to the lake of fire with his hordes, and that’s it.
Had God done that, you and I would never have the chance to hear the gospel. So God gives the Devil a stay of execution. It means there’ll be holocausts and genocides and wars and rape, things that God hates. But out of it all, the core of his plan is to rescue people, to draw them to his side, to win those who by his favor will be granted an eternity of joy and peace and service to God.
Have you come across Christians who said that if you only had great faith, God would heal you?
Yes. I would read those passages of Scripture which seemed to guarantee that God would heal. When I was released from the hospital, I remember going to crusades of Kathryn Kuhlman, a famous faith healer, a Benny Hinn sort. I hoped that somehow God’s healing spirit would visit the wheelchair section, that those of us who were the tough cases would suddenly jump up out of our wheelchairs—but the spotlight was always on the other side of the stadium.
How did you feel when the ushers came at the end to escort you away, unhealed?
I remember sitting there looking up and down this line of people on crutches, walkers, and wheelchairs and thinking to myself, Something’s wrong with this picture. I must not be looking deep enough into God’s Word, because I know these people believed. I certainly believed. I was calling up my girlfriends, saying, “Next time you see me I’m going to be running up your sidewalk. God’s going to heal me.”
So I went back into God’s Word and began to see things I never saw before—such as in the Gospel of Matthew where Jesus says, If your eye causes you sin, pluck it out. If your hand sins, cut it off. Better that you go into life maimed than enter hellfire (5:29–30). That little portion of Scripture clued me in to God’s priorities. God would have us go through life maimed if that means spiritual health and well-being. That is the deeper healing that he’s looking for. So I quit banging on heaven’s doors to get me healed. I began submitting to his Word.
When you were in the hospital room, in despair about having, were some comments people made—with good intentions—hugely irritating?
I had many well-meaning friends my age who said well-meaning things, but they were uninformed, because the Bible says, “Weep with those who weep” (Rom. 12:15, ESV). Many friends would say to me, from Romans 8:28, “Joni, all things fit together to a pattern for good.” Or from James 1:3, “Welcome this trial as a friend.” Or from Romans 5, “Rejoice in suffering.”
These are good and right and true biblical mandates, but when your heart is being wrung out like a sponge, sometimes the 16 good biblical reasons as to why all this has happened to you sting like salt in the wound. When people are going through great trauma, great grief, they don’t want answers. Because answers don’t reach the problems where it hurts in the gut, in the heart.
What does help?
When I was a little girl, I remember riding my bike down a steep hill. I made a right-hand turn. My wheels skidded out on gravel, and I crashed to the ground. My knee was a bloody mess. My dad comes running out. I’m screaming and crying. Although I didn’t ask why [I had fallen], if I had, how cruel it would have been for my father to stand over me and say, “Well, sweetheart, let me answer that question. The next time you’re going down the hill, watch the steepness. Be careful about the trajectory of your turn. Be observant of gravel.”
Those would all have been good answers to the question “Why did this happen?” But when people are going through great trauma and great grief, they don’t want to know why. They want Daddy to pick them up, press them against his chest, pat them on the back, and say, “There, there, sweetheart, Daddy’s here. It’s okay.” When we are hurting, that’s what we want. We want God to be Daddy: warm, compassionate, real, in the middle of our suffering. We want fatherly assurance that our world is not spinning out of control.
When you were in the hospital, what from your friends did sink in?
One night my high school friend Jackie, with whom I shared boyfriends, milkshakes, and hockey sticks, came into the hospital late one night, like 2 in the morning, past visiting hours. The nurses were on break. No one was in the hallway. She crept up the steps of the hospital, snuck in the back way, came into my six-bed ward. I was with five other spinal-cord-injured girls who were all asleep. My friend came sneaking into the room, crawling on her hands and knees. She came over to my bed, stood up slowly, and lowered the guardrail of the hospital bed. Just like high schoolers will do on pajama sleepovers, she climbed into bed next to me, snuggled real close, and softly began to sing: “Man of sorrows, what a name, for the Son of God who came, ruined sinners to reclaim. Hallelujah, what a Savior!”
I get choked up thinking about it. She gave me something that night that was priceless. She helped me encounter Jesus Christ in a warm and personal way. That’s how precious the body of Christ is to healing the hearts of those who are hurting, to come up close to them, to infuse into their spiritual veins life, hope, healing, health. That’s what Jackie gave me that night. She gave me Jesus in a real and personal way. That’s really what I needed. So don’t you dare be caught rejoicing with those who weep. Weep with those who weep.
