Ten
Ten
Thank You, God, for This Wheelchair
O LORD, you are my God;
I will exalt you and praise your name,
for in perfect faithfulness
you have done marvelous things,
things planned long ago.
—Isaiah 25:1
Her name is Shantamma.
When our Wheels team was in India recently, we met this bright-eyed eighteen-year-old, from a Hindu family living in Ongole.
No one born in the poverty and despair of the teeming slums of this city has an easy life. But many have had it easier than Shantamma. Born with a disability, she has spent her life scooting around on the floor of the family’s tiny home, dragging her legs behind her and rarely venturing outside her front door.
The message of good news in Christ, however, has permeated this coastal city of 300,000. Four years previous to our meeting Shantamma, an evangelical pastor from a small church made contact with the family. When he learned of Shantamma’s condition, he went back to his little office, picked up his tattered copy of an old Joni book out of his meager library, and brought it to the young woman as a gift.
Although a Hindu her whole life, Shantamma read that book cover to cover. With tears running down her cheeks, she made up her mind to trust in Jesus Christ … just like Joni. In fact, she read that book eight times, rehearsing over and over how a person could come to salvation through Jesus. And finally, that is what she did. In a big decision that undoubtedly had consequences within her family and her community, Shantamma left the Hindu religion and became a Christian.
Then our team came, bringing wheelchairs and Bibles to Ongole to deliver to needy disabled people. After all those years of crawling and dragging herself from place to place, Shantamma learned to her wonder and delight that she was to receive her own wheelchair. The chair, however, had an excitement for her that went far beyond the gift itself. These were followers of Jesus who were giving those wheelchairs to people! Shantamma was so proud and excited to think that the God she had learned to trust from reading the Joni book so many times, that this God—her own God—was showing her this special kindness and providing an opportunity for her to receive an actual wheelchair fit just for her.
After Shantamma was finally fitted for her chair, however, she was shocked and stunned to learn where the chairs had come from. She burst into tears when she realized that these wheelchairs were sent “by her very own Joni, from so far away.”
Since that day, Shantamma has experienced a new level of joy and confidence, and has become more emboldened to share her faith in Christ with friends and neighbors still locked in the Hindu religion. She said to one of our team members, “I am ready to go wherever God leads me in this wheelchair … just like Joni.”
My friends, this is one of a million reasons why I am grateful God didn’t heal me of my paralysis. What if I had been healed at the Kathryn Kuhlman crusade back in the early 1970s? What if God had answered my prayers as a seventeen-year-old, released me from my paralysis, and returned me to a normal life of a woman on her feet?
It might have been well for me, but what about Shantamma?
There would have been no Joni book for the pastor to give this young woman with so little hope and so few prospects, and there would have been no Joni and Friends or Wheels for the World to do a wheelchair distribution for impoverished people in Ongole, India.
Would Shantamma have come to Jesus anyway? Would God have gained glory and would the name of Jesus have been held high in those slums through her bright, joyful testimony?
That is a mystery of God’s providence, and as someone has said, is “above my pay grade.” In C. S. Lewis’s children’s classic Prince Caspian, Lucy asks the great lion Aslan what would have happened if she had made a different choice at a crucial crossroads in her journey through Narnia. Aslan replied to her, “To know what would have happened, child? No, nobody is ever told that.”
I can’t know what would have happened to Shantamma if there had been no quadriplegic girl in America named Joni to inspire her and lead her to faith in the one true God. Perhaps, as Mordecai told Esther, “relief and deliverance” for this girl would have arisen “from another place.”
I only know that because I wasn’t healed, because God had plans for my life that were wider and higher and deeper and more profound than I could have ever imagined, a teenage girl named Shantamma from the slums of urban India will be with me in heaven. In glorious new bodies that will never tire and never fade, we’ll explore the high mountains of that place, and the wide, green meadows, and we will laugh out loud for joy over the goodness and grace of our heavenly Father.
What will those decades of disability mean to me then? What will those few years of chronic pain, tears, and frustration add up to then?
That’s enough right there to cause me to say, “Thank you, God, for this wheelchair.”
That’s one story. Let me give you just one more.
Every time we go on a trip of any kind, I ask the Lord to show us His favor, to reveal Himself to us here, there, and everywhere along the way.
Not long ago my friends Bev and Francie and I came back to our hotel after I had spoken at a school for the physically disabled. The housekeeper was still cleaning my hotel room, so I went into Bev and Francie’s room right next door (we always get connecting rooms so we can easily run back and forth). Anyway, as we were waiting, we happened to notice a little handwritten note on Bev’s side table. It was from the housekeeper. She had just cleaned the room and had written these words on a hotel notepad:
Dear Joni, I read your book when I first became a Christian in 1980, and the Lord used you to see me through some very tough times.
Was it the same housekeeper who was now cleaning my room? That’s what I wanted to find out, so I wheeled into the adjoining room and asked the young woman who was tucking in the corners of the bedsheets, “Pardon me; did you leave a note for me next door?”
The little housekeeper looked up, eyes wide. Immediately she grabbed a pillow off the bed, buried her face in it, and began to cry. In between sobs, I learned that her name was Rachel, and that she had read my book and then seen the Joni movie on Christian television. It had been a wonderful blessing to her, she told me.
“No, Rachel,” I replied, “you are the blessing to us today, because you are an answer to prayer. We had asked the Lord Jesus to encourage us as we left that school a few minutes ago, to help us sense His favor. And we came back here to this hotel, and He’s got you waiting for us. Waiting to deliver a blessing!”
Yes, it’s just another little incident from my life—not very dramatic, I suppose. But it is stories like these on which my life hinges. Because of the Joni book, and the Joni movie that grew out of it, a young woman named Rachel, facing a turning point in her own life in 1980, found courage in Christ to go on. What were those “tough times” she was facing in that dark season of her youth? I don’t know, and I may never know.
But I do know that when God chose not to heal me, He was seeing little Rachel in His mind’s eye, loving her, and wanting to provide for her and comfort her heart. And He was seeing Shantamma, who was wondering if anyone in the world could ever help her or care for her as she dragged herself around her little house in Ongole. And He was seeing thousands, perhaps millions of others whom I will never meet on this side of heaven, whose lives were somehow touched by the story of a paralyzed girl in her wheelchair.
And thinking of that, I am filled with awe, and say again, “Thank You, God, for this wheelchair.”
“Marvelous Things … Planned Long Ago”
Not long ago I came across these amazing words in the book of Isaiah:
O LORD, you are my God;
I will exalt you and praise your name,
for in perfect faithfulness
you have done marvelous things,
things planned long ago. (Isa. 25:1)
In a time of spiritual confusion, national decline, and world turmoil, in a day when storms brooded on the horizon and the sounds of war rumbled in the distance, the prophet Isaiah took time to reflect on God’s perfect faithfulness, marvelous deeds, and unfathomable plans.
Lord, he said, no matter what happens, I claim You as my one-and-only God. You’re mine! No matter what anyone else chooses to say or do all around me, I’m going to lift up Your name as high as I can for as long as I live, and place my full confidence in Your plans. Lord, You are the Faithful One. Long ago, You looked forward to this very day, and You have planned all of it—marvelous things! Thank You, God, for this ministry You have given me.
A difficult ministry? A heartbreaking task sometimes?
To be sure.
From the very beginning, he’d been told that his immediate audience wasn’t going to listen to him or heed his words. Their hearts would be calloused; their ears would be dull; their eyes would be closed.1 He was asked to do some very difficult things, things that would have been humiliating and an assault on his dignity as a gentleman and a man of God.2
But in his heart of hearts, Isaiah was thankful. He had told the Lord, “Here am I. Send me!” and didn’t look back. God’s plan was the best of all possible plans, and therefore the life he had been given—difficult as it may have been—was the best life he could have asked for.
And anyway, he knew what was ahead! Though the saints in the Old Testament didn’t have all of the revelation that we do on heaven, Isaiah had been given a bright vision that burned and blossomed and danced in his mind’s eye. In the same chapter, just a few verses later, he wrote:
On this mountain the LORD Almighty will prepare
a feast of rich food for all peoples….
On this mountain he will destroy
the shroud that enfolds all peoples,
the sheet that covers all nations;
he will swallow up death forever.
The Sovereign LORD will wipe away the tears
from all faces;
he will remove the disgrace of his people
from all the earth.
The LORD has spoken. (25:6–8)
I will add my voice of praise to his.
Thank You, God, for this life You have given me. Thank You for the many opportunities to serve You, even in my pain. Thank You, God, for this wheelchair. For it’s been granted to me to not only believe on Your Son, but to suffer for His sake. Oh joy!
… For in perfect faithfulness
you have done marvelous things,
things planned long ago.
As I have stated in the pages of this book, so many have tried to get me to say that my accident forty-three years ago was never part of God’s plan. That my paralysis was never His intention. That quadriplegia was never necessary. That chronic pain didn’t have to be. That suffering was never part of His plan. That the many tears and groans and struggles and sleepless nights were needless and a waste of my energy and my life.
I know differently.
It was all planned long ago, and God brought it about in His perfect faithfulness. And because He allowed it and permitted it, because He has walked with me through every moment of it, His plan has been marvelous for Joni Eareckson Tada.
And let me add this. I mean these words as much as I have ever meant any words:
I am content.
The Secret of Contentment
“I’m glad in God, far happier than you would ever guess.…”
Paul wrote from a lonely prison cell, far from home, and cut off from friends, family, fresh air, and the light of day. He’d been incarcerated for simply being a believer in Jesus Christ—and having the gall to talk about it and teach others about Him. But if his enemies thought that the dungeon would break his spirit, they couldn’t have been further from the truth.
“Actually,” he went on, “I don’t have a sense of needing anything personally. I’ve learned by now to be quite content whatever my circumstances. I’m just as happy with little as with much, with much as with little. I’ve found the recipe for being happy whether full or hungry, hands full or hands empty. Whatever I have, wherever I am, I can make it through anything in the One who makes me who I am.”3
“Glad in God”?
“Far happier than you would ever guess”?
“I’ve found the recipe for happiness”?
It really doesn’t make much logical sense, does it? How could the apostle Paul be content—even joyful—over so little?
It reminds me of meeting Summer last year—a beautiful, young, athletic girl who had been trained as a lifeguard. Not long ago she broke her neck and is now paralyzed and in a wheelchair.
On the day we visited, however, Summer had something exciting to share with me. She wanted to show me how she could move her wrists a little bit and make tiny movements in one or two of her fingers.
“Wow!” I said. “That’s awesome! How wonderful! You have every reason to hope big that you’ll get back more. People who are spinal-cord injured can regain a lot within the first year.”
The people standing around us smiled, looking on with curiosity. I’m sure we looked a little odd. Here we were, both in wheelchairs, both severely paralyzed—no use of our legs or feet, limited arm movement, no use of hands—and knowing full well that the bulk of our paralyses are permanent.
And yet …
We were thrilled at the fact that young Summer could move her wrist an eensy-weensy eighth to a quarter of an inch. Really, it was almost imperceptible, but if you looked very carefully, you could see that joint move ever so slightly. By some secret and incomprehensible pathway, a command from Summer’s brain was somehow sneaking around or through the massive neural roadblock created by her injury, and there was movement, blessed movement, in one of her limbs. And she and I were ecstatic. We laughed and talked as excitedly as if she had just completed her first marathon, graduated from college, or announced her engagement.
“But it was no big deal,” you say. “It was just a tiny movement.”
Yes, but when you’re paralyzed, you measure happiness in quarter-inch increments. A quarter-inch of good news, received from the Lord with a grateful heart, can bring as much joy as half a mile of good news to an indifferent or cynical heart.
As we celebrated together, it was as though the dreadful reality that 90-plus percent of her body was paralyzed didn’t really matter in those moments … and didn’t even figure into the equation.
And do you know what? It truly didn’t.
Summer had an equation for contentment, and her paralysis simply didn’t show up in the calculation.
Sometimes you have to look at the glass half-full rather than half-empty. More than that, even when there’s only a few drops in the bottom of the glass, you have to think, “There’s something in there. Isn’t that wonderful? It could be empty, but no, there’s something to rejoice about!”
And so you do, as joyously and with as full a heart as the Lord enables you.
Summer has every reason to hope that she’ll get back yet a little more movement in her hands. Maybe she’ll graduate to half an inch, or even one-inch movements. If she does, we’ll go ballistic. The party will be on. But even if she doesn’t, I do believe this young woman will still be content. Contentment is realizing that God has already given her everything she needs for her present happiness. It is the wise person who doesn’t grieve for the things he doesn’t have, but rejoices over the things he does have.
Have you prayed for healing and God has said “wait” or “no”? Will you be content with Him, and Him alone, even if your most fervent prayers are placed on hold?
Summer has learned (and is learning) the lesson that Fanny Crosby, the blind hymn writer of an earlier generation, once observed. She said, “O what a happy soul am I! Although I cannot see, I am resolved that in this world contented I will be; how many blessings I enjoy that other people don’t! To weep and sigh because I’m blind, I cannot, and I won’t.”
Glass half-full people are called optimists, and it truly is the best and happiest way for anyone to live. But we who put our faith in Jesus Christ have something beyond mere optimism, positive thinking, or rose-colored lenses. We have a hope that not only fills our glass halfway, it overflows it. Romans 15:13 says, “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.”
If we have Him, how much else do we really need?
A tiny movement of my friend Summer’s wrist filled her with gladness. Strangely enough, that’s the way it is when you have very little—when life gets stripped down to the basics.
I had a friend (who can now afford a number of luxuries) tell me that one of the happiest summers of his life was when he was a single young man, freshly graduated from Bible college, working for minimum wage in a bookstore, and living in an upstairs room of an old college dorm house. It was a time of life, he said, when he could fit all of his worldly belongings (except a bicycle) into his Volkswagen. He didn’t know what was ahead; he had only enough money for room and board (and little else). He met with several guys a couple times a week for one of the most exciting Bible studies he had ever experienced, and in his spare hours, he explored the nearby summer countryside on his bicycle.
It was definitely a transitional phase of life for him, and he wouldn’t have wanted to stay in that place forever. But looking back now, he can see it for what it was: a peaceful, joyful interval of life during which he had few responsibilities, fewer possessions, and plenty of time to seek a closer relationship with God.
“I’m just as happy with little as with much, with much as with little. I’ve found the recipe for being happy whether full or hungry, hands full or hands empty. Whatever I have, wherever I am, I can make it through anything in the One who makes me who I am.”4
I have another young friend whose life situation is even more restricted and limited than Summer’s. Another beautiful, athletic girl—just thirteen years old—and with a great singing voice, Cathe was running down her street trying to make it to school before the late bell rang when she was struck by a fast-moving car. She, too, was totally paralyzed by the accident … but much more so than Summer or I.
Summer can move some fingers and bend her wrist, and I can fling my arms around using my shoulder muscles. But Cathe sits absolutely rigid and must use a ventilator to be able to breathe. She maneuvers her wheelchair by means of pressing her tongue against a special retainer in her mouth.
The last time I saw her, ten years had passed since her accident, and she was a young woman of twenty-three. When I met her, she was poised, personable, and even though she can’t speak normally, she shares a radiant testimony of how Christ has met every need of her life.
Listen to a few lines from a longer poem she wrote not long ago—timed to the spaces between the breathing of her ventilator.
Now when people see me
in my wheelchair bound,
no one knows (though I am still)
the joy that I have found.
My arms they will not move again,
my legs they do not walk,
without my special speaking valve,
I cannot even talk.
These simple facts mean nothing,
these things that you can see,
it’s the unseen changes made inside,
by Him who lives in me.
No person knows contentment
such as He has given me,
unless they gave their heart to Him,
then waited patiently,
for Him to do the shaping part,
the way He did for me.
All I Need, I Already Have
Can you sign your name under that statement?
Does that express your heart?
Does it express mine?
I’ve had to ask that question numerous times—and more so since pain has set ever more severe restrictions on my freedom and abilities.
What do I have?
Unlike my young friend Cathe, I still have a voice. I can speak, I can sing hymns of praise, and I can even talk over the radio to a nationwide audience. Unlike many disabled people I have met around the world, I have a wheelchair. I also have a husband who loves me, friends who care about me, and coworkers who labor at my side in common purpose. Not everyone has been blessed with such truly wondrous gifts as these, but I have.
And according to the Lord, that’s all I need. For if there were anything more that I needed, He would have given it to me.
Am I using what I have?
Well, I will admit it’s been more difficult lately. It’s more difficult to travel, write, paint, and record those radio programs I mentioned. I’m more limited in my activities, but I still show up for work, offering what I have to the Lord for His use, and asking for His help. And I know that I will have that help, because He never gives a task without supplying the need. His command never comes without empowerment.
Am I prepared to lose what I have?
Ah, this is the litmus test of contentment. This one scares me a little. Despite Job’s agony, he cried out, “Though he slay me, yet will I hope in him”!5 He was prepared to believe, even to the point of death. To be honest, it frightens me to think about the future sometimes. What if my pain never goes away—or gets even worse? What if my paralysis becomes even more profound, and I lose the few abilities I now possess? Well, deep down I know the answer: My calling isn’t only to abandon my future wants, but to trust in God and hand over what I already possess.
Am I ready to receive what I don’t have?
What would that be? What might it look like? I have no idea. More responsibility? More open doors? More suffering for His name’s sake? I can assure you, my friends, that I’m not looking to “enlarge my borders” like Jabez, and expand my spiritual territory. I’d just be happy if God would simply make my heart larger to receive more of His peace and joy.
How long has it been since you’ve done a thoughtful inventory of your possessions? The secret of contentment is wrapped up in simple gratitude for what God has already provided you.6
Sometimes when the day (or night!) seems long, and life in the wheelchair seems like a heavy weight to bear, I remind myself that my Lord Jesus Himself was handicapped.
Jesus Himself Chose to Be Handicapped
Does that concept startle you just a little?
You know me: I’m always looking to see what God’s Word has to say about physical limitations. And when you study the life of Jesus, you have to stop and consider that although our Savior did not have a physical disability per se, He did handicap Himself when He came to earth.
Boy, did He ever.
How can I say that for sure? Well, the dictionary defines “handicap” as any difficulty that is imposed on a superior person so as to hamper or disadvantage him, making that person more equal with others.
Certainly, if we use that definition, then Jesus was handicapped.
Think of it!
On one hand, the fullness of God dwelt in Christ, yet on the other hand He “made Himself nothing.” He emptied Himself, taking the very nature of a servant. Talk about handicaps! Can you imagine a greater one? To be God on one hand, and yet to make Himself nothing! That is one severe limitation which, you would think, would have hampered our Lord or put Him at a disadvantage.
Jesus, the Master Architect of the entire universe, designed suns and stars, galaxies and planets. When He handicapped Himself, He made Himself a carpenter on earth, limiting Himself to designing common wooden chairs, stools, tables, and yokes for necks of oxen.
Jesus was also the one who spoke the Word, creating everything around us. But this same Jesus who spoke time and space into being handicapped Himself on earth, choosing instead to speak to prostitutes, lepers, and sinners.
Jesus, the one who since Satan’s fall had despised pain and suffering as one of the awful results of man’s sin, handicapped Himself on earth when His back ached and His muscles cramped and when He sweat real sweat and cried real tears and bled real blood.
When I think of all this, it strikes me that these limitations didn’t just “happen” to Jesus in the same way that circumstances “happen” to you and me. The amazing thing is that Christ chose to be handicapped. I can’t think of too many people who would actually choose to be disabled. Believe me, I know I wouldn’t! There is nothing easy, nothing fun, nothing casual about dealing with a disability. From the very get-go, it’s hard.
But Jesus chose to handicap Himself so that you and I might share eternity with Him in bodies that will never stoop, limp, falter, or fail. Jesus chose to experience pain and suffering beyond our imagination in order that you and I would one day walk the streets of heaven whole, happy, and pain free. Jesus chose to die—though that was a daunting task in itself. As C. S. Lewis wrote, Jesus “was so full of life that when He wished to die He had to ‘borrow death from others.’”
But borrow it He did, taking it unto Himself, yielding up His life, so that you and I might pass through death’s shadow and live forever.
Yes, while I’m alive here on earth, I am called to endure a handicap. But how could I be other than grateful and content? I’m in the best company of all.
One Last Thought: Kneel
Sometimes I will open up the old Book of Common Prayer from the Reformed Episcopal Church I grew up in. At this writing, I was reminded that it will be Epiphany Sunday this weekend. And from the Psalter reading of that day:
They shall fear thee, as long as the sun and moon endureth, from one generation to another.
He shall come down like the rain upon the mown grass, even as the drops that water the earth.
In his time shall the righteousness flourish; yea, and abundance of peace, so long as the moon endureth.
His dominion shall be also from the River unto the world’s end.
It makes me want to … kneel.
In our little Maryland church, people preached the gospel, read from the liturgy, sang hymns from the heart, and they kneeled in prayer before the Lord. Worship was a serious thing, and I learned as a child what it meant to bend the knee before the Lord.
It’s not that I want to make a big thing about kneeling in prayer, per se. It’s just that … I wish I could do it. Being paralyzed in a wheelchair, it’s impossible to literally bend my knees and bow in prayer.
I remember a banquet at a big conference I attended not long ago. I was sitting along with everyone else in a huge ballroom. At the close of the message, the speaker asked everyone to do something unusual: He asked us to push our chairs away from the tables and, if we felt comfortable in doing so, get out of our chairs and kneel on the carpeted floor, together, in prayer.
Well, I sat there in my wheelchair and watched as everyone else in the room, maybe five hundred or six hundred people, got out of their chairs and down on their knees for a brief time of worship. With everyone kneeling in that great banquet hall, I’m afraid I stood out as the only one remaining seated.
Looking around the room, I couldn’t stop the tears.
Oh, I wasn’t crying out of self-pity or because I felt strange or different that I was the only one sitting. My eyes were wet because it was so beautiful to see everyone kneeling in prayer. (Maybe I am making a big deal about kneeling!) It made me think of the day when I, too, will be able to get out of this wheelchair on new, resurrected legs.
I can’t wait for that day, because when I get my glorified body, the first thing I’m going to do with my new made-for-eternity legs is to fall down on grateful, glorified knees. I will once again have the chance to say with Psalm 95:6: “Come let us bow down in worship, let us kneel before the LORD our Maker.”
If you’ve read any of my previous books, you will know how I have dreamed of the day when I can run, leap, walk, jump, and dance. It will be my privilege: a new body that can move will be my blessing for a job well done on earth. But I think that kneeling very still on bended knees will be my sacrifice of praise. To not move when I will at last be able to move will be one last chance to show the Lord how thankful I really am.
So I will kneel …
… on the bright green turf of heaven’s rolling meadows.
… on an avenue of gold, smooth as glass, clear as an artesian spring, cool as an April breeze, and shot through with fire.
… with saints from all ages, former kings and queens, apostles and martyrs, farmer’s wives and soldiers, and wonderful people through all the years who loved Jesus more than life.
… with mighty angelic beings who knew how to kneel before they knew how to walk—or fly.
It’s been a long time since I’ve actually kneeled in prayer. Those long-ago days at that little Reformed Episcopal Church seem so far away, softened and made more beautiful in the golden haze of memory.
But the day is drawing near, isn’t it? It’s drawing so close to the time when I, and so many others who cannot walk, will be able to kneel. I know it. I can feel it. Heaven is just around the corner.
If you sense His coming is soon, would you please do me a favor? Do what so many of us who are paralyzed or too lame or too old or disabled can’t do. Would you open your Bible to Psalm 95:6, read it aloud, and then do what it says?
I can’t kneel, but if you can, do.
Kneel before the Lord God, your Maker and mine. And while you’re down there, if you feel so inclined, thank Him for being so good to a paralyzed woman named Joni.