Hi, I’m Joni Eareckson Tada telling you how it all got started.
Welcome to "Joni and Friends" which, as you know, has been on the air for a long time — almost as long as Joni and Friends, the ministry organization. Although I love sharing these few minutes with you every day on the radio, it’s just one part (a significant part), but only one part of what we do at Joni and Friends. And you hear me talk about what we do all the time. We deliver wheelchairs and Bibles around the world (100,000 this year it will be), and we hold scores of the Family Retreats across the United State and in developing nations giving the Gospel to special needs families. We welcome interns; we develop courses of study on college campuses; we respond to countless requests for help from people with disabilities who need hope and we’ve been doing it all for 35 years.
How did it all get started? Well, that’s quite a story. When I was a struggling mouth artist in the early 70’s in Baltimore, a local television station highlighted my artwork. The NBC studios in New York saw that TV story and, before I knew it, I was on the Today Show with Barbara Walters. A Christian publisher happened to watch my interview with Barbara Walters that morning and wrote to ask if I would put my story in a book, which I did, and the Joni book was published in 1976. From there, Mrs. Graham read the book, showed it to her husband Billy, and the next thing I knew I was being invited to speak on Mr. Graham’s Crusades. Next, thing I knew, the Billy Graham people turned the book into a movie -- the “Joni” movie. And that’s when I began receiving letters — I’d get letters — so many letters from people with disabilities all over the world, asking about my faith in Christ, what to do about depression, looking for advice, counsel, how did I get my church involved, what do I think about miraculous healing, and more.
Well, right away, I knew all this — every bit of it — was designed by God. Certainly not for my sake, no, I believe God gave me that honored platform in order to fit in with His strategy to reach the world’s disabled with the Gospel of His Son, Jesus. It was all about a new and global way to give the love of Christ to the world’s most desperate and most needy, and that is children with disabilities, women with disabilities, and adults and elderly people with disabilities. And so in 1979, after the “Joni” movie, with help from the Billy Graham Association and a small grant from World Vision, I started “Joni and Friends” — I called it that because I knew I certainly couldn’t manage such an organization on my own. No, I needed friends! From the very beginning, our ministry was all about serving special-needs families in the name of Jesus. And now, 35 years later, God is still expanding our outreach into some of the darkest corners of the world (as well as some pretty dark corners in institutions and care facilities here in the states). We’re all about training and energizing the church to carry the Gospel banner to special needs families in their communities—and I so love, all of us at the ministry, love doing it.
The guiding principle from the Word of God for us has always been Luke chapter 14 where Jesus tells us to go out and find the disabled and bring them in so that His Father’s house will be full. I’d love for you to learn more, and you can by visiting my radio page today at joniandfriends.org and ask for your free CD of "Joni and Friends" programs that highlight our 35th anniversary celebration. And, friend, should you know of a special-needs family who needs encouragement, put them in touch with us. We definitely want to serve them as we celebrate 35 years of outreach into the disability community.
© Joni and Friends
Compliments of Joni and Friends
PO Box 3333 Agoura Hills, CA 91376