Your Savior meets you in the midst of even the most painful circumstances. This is the most precious thing to remember about suffering – Jesus is with you in it! He has not abandoned you for even a moment.
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This is one week where I can say, “I’ve lived in this wheelchair a long time!”
Hi, I’m Joni Eareckson Tada and 55 years is, indeed, a long time to live without use of your hands or legs. It’s a long time to live in a wheelchair. And given that this Saturday I’ll be cresting five decades and five years with my disability, I have been sharing all week long the main lessons that God has taught me. And I trust these lessons will help you deal with your own hardships.
You know, many people say, “Joni, how have you actually managed it all these years? How have you been able to keep your smile in your wheelchair?” Well, I will tell you one thing: long, long ago I learned not to say, “I hate this! I just can’t do this wheelchair, my disability’s just so hard I can’t stand it!” I mean, words like that are filled with such anger and anxiety. And those emotions only make things worse, a lot worse; I mean, that sort of response to suffering is fraught with tension and pressure. So instead, I learned back then to speak peacefully into my problems with my paralysis, always breathing deeply, speaking truth into my disability. I ask Jesus to meet me in my suffering, to not let it crush me or overwhelm me. And the Son of God never fails to show up, just as he met those three Hebrews in the hot furnace of fire described in Daniel 3:25. And what does Jesus say to me in my places of agony? He comforts me with his own words. Like 2 Corinthians 4:8, where Jesus tells me – actually, he tells all of us in our suffering – he says that although you are, “hard pressed on every side, you will not be crushed.” What a promise! My quadriplegia with all its pain and frustrations may try to tighten its vice grip around me, but it cannot crush me. As I cling to Bible promises, my pain pushes me further into the heart of Jesus Christ, where abiding in him always brings safety and solace. There’s nothing sweeter than finding my Savior in the middle of my hellish circumstances – it helps deflect the pain; it helps me to suffer well. Jesus helps me to be in that unhappy place well.
And, oh, this is perhaps the most precious thing I’ve learned in all the decades I’ve lived in my wheelchair. I have never experienced deliverance from my disability with all its pains. But I’ve met my Deliverer in it. I haven’t been healed of quadriplegia, but I have found intimate fellowship with the Healer. This seems to be the way God enjoys working through our suffering. Rarely does he rescue us out of those hard places; instead, he speaks peace into our problems and invites us to discover our Rescuer, Jesus Christ. If we want to get close to God, the path into his heart will almost always be a road filled with suffering. Because in our sufferings, we leave behind the trappings of comfort and ease; and in our suffering, we follow Jesus down his dark road to Calvary. Our sufferings show us the Man of Sorrows as nothing else can. The Man of Sorrows who, in our hardships, becomes our Lord of joy.
So, friend, look for the Lord Jesus in your suffering, because when you find him, as I have found him in my worst times with quadriplegia, you’ll see that he has transfigured that place to become a place of union with him. And that is one of the most precious things about 55 years of quadriplegia: finding Jesus in the midst of my worst suffering. Hey, I’m celebrating him all this week as we draw closer to July 30, the day so many, many years ago when everything changed.
© Joni and Friends