Joni: Hi, I’m Joni Eareckson Tada and I have my good friend, John Wern, at the microphone.
And the reason I’m excited about having John is because as you know we are celebrating 35 years of ministry here at Joni and Friends. And when I think of volunteers and staff people with whom I’ve worked with the longest, John Wern tops the list. This guy has been with us since 1986/1987 and came on staff in 1989. John, thanks for coming today.
John: It’s great to be back.
Joni: You were there no only at the beginning of our Family Retreat outreach at Joni and Friends, you were there at the beginning of our Wheels for the World outreach where we take wheelchairs and Bibles around the world and do evangelism and fit people with disabilities to our wheelchairs. Christian physical therapists go with us – yata, yata, yata – you know that story well. You were there at the beginning. Tell us where we went and who we saw.
John: Well, we saw a lot of people and what is amazing is what the wheelchair can do for a life. To the world it’s so much rubber, so much metal, but a person who couldn’t walk or get around we’ve seen it change lives with jobs, allow them to be able to go to church and seen it change attitudes for families. One family where the mother was the one who was disabled, she just was not part of the family. She just lay in bed and when she was given the wheelchair now her kids could push her around outside. They could literally go anywhere they wanted to go now because she didn’t have to be carried any more. And it just changed the life of not only her, but the entire family and the community when they saw her out and around with her family.
Joni: I remember one time you came back from Ghana, West Africa. You had visited the village of Kumasi and you had given away all the wheelchairs and there was one woman who had carried her child with a disability on her back some two or three miles to receive a wheelchair, but there were none left and you felt so badly and then this woman said ‘Don’t worry, I know you’ll be back’. Did you go back?
John: We went back and not only that, you came with us. That was the story that you wrote up to KLM that one the award that flew our whole team there in 1995.
Joni: Right! Well, I remember when we went to Kumasi that year. Oh, my goodness, we had such a great time. There was a big pavilion I remember and we wanted to play music, but the amplifier and the recorder was broken and Jim Sanders – who I’m looking at right now who is sitting on the other side of the glass window, fiddling the knobs today on our Joni and Friends radio program – was there with us and he fixed this radio that has been manufactured in Moscow, Russia I don’t know how many years earlier and soon we had music; we started dancing and singing “Higher, higher, higher, lift up Jesus higher “.You know, I look back John on many memories and that to me was one of my most sweetest, precious memories of what it’s going to be like to ‘hands down, slam down’ dance in heaven. Wasn’t that a night of joy? Remember that?
John: Yes, I do and what I remember is the number of disabled people who were dancing on the ground – crawling and dancing – and that gave me goose bumps and I felt that this is “Holy ground” that we were on at that time..
Joni: Absolutely! And that was at the very beginning of Wheels for the World and from there it grew. Now, 2014 is a special anniversary for Wheels for the World, right?
John: Twenty years! The 100,000th wheel chair they are going to be giving away this year.
Joni: One hundred thousand! That is incredible. And of course with Bibles and the Joni book in various languages. Thank you, John, for your leadership these many years, which has been invested in the growth of “Wheels for the World”. I love ya, but so do a whole lot of people with disabilities around the world who now have the gift of ability because of your love for the Lord Jesus. Thank you, John.
John: Thanks for having me. It’s been a lot of fun.
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