Hi, I’m Joni Eareckson Tada and this week we’re celebrating anniversaries.
Yesterday you heard from my husband, Ken, on our 30th wedding anniversary. And looking back on that time together, here on "Joni and Friends", well, I just have to tell you, it means the world to me to be able to sit at this microphone and listen to my husband talk about marriage. Because it ain’t easy taking care of me, a quadriplegic, who deals daily with pain. And it is this pain and the problems associated with my quadriplegia that have bound Ken and me together—like that verse in Ecclesiastes, how two are better than one.
And I believe that. In fact, it’s funny, but I have a hard time these days just writing my name “Joni.” I always want to write “Joni and Ken.” No, not as though it were stamped on a wedding napkin or written on a house mortgage. No, it’s more visceral than that. Three decades have passed since Ken and I began our journey together, and God has used every trial—every hurt and heartache—to entwine us far more intimately together than we ever dreamed on the day we married.
But here’s the thing: the more devastating the trials, the more God has wrapped us both around Himself. God has used depression and chronic pain and cancer—even far more than quadriplegia—to bind us tighter than ever, to each other and to Him.
That’s the “cord of three strands” that Ecclesiastes speaks about: Husband, wife, and the Lord Jesus. If the man and woman twine their lives around each other in marriage, that is good, and they’ll be stronger for it. But if both of them twine themselves around the living God, that’s best of all. It’s a union that will hold through whatever life—or whatever hell—might throw at them.
It’s a beautiful picture, but you know Ken and I are so aware that it isn’t true for every marriage. It’s especially difficult for couples dealing with a serious disability: so many of those marriages just don’t survive the test, because we live in a society that doesn’t know what to do with suffering. We do everything we can think of to escape it: we medicate it, mask it, surgically remove it, entertain or drug it, institutionalize it, divorce it, or even euthanize it—anything but live with it. Suffering, however, isn’t about to go away—and marriage only magnifies it.
It’s why I hope for you that, well, just knowing there’s a quadriplegic and her husband who are hanging in there … because nowhere—and with no one else—will you have quite the chance to experience union with Christ, than through a hard-fought-for, hard-won union with your spouse. So, hang in there, friend. Life will not always be this hard, or marriage so difficult. There is coming a Day when something so glorious will appear, that it will supersede even marriage. And when you touch the Savior’s nail-scarred hands to say “thank You,” you’ll have every confidence He will recognize you as the one who persevered, taking up your cross daily to redeem the hard places in your marriage, just as He once took up His cross to redeem you. So, take a deep breath and let it—whatever that irksome it is in your marriage—let it go. Quit resisting and start affirming your life partner. After all, loving your spouse … well, it’s just another way, maybe the best way, of loving and serving God. Oh, and one more thing: don’t forget to stop by my radio page at joniandfriends.org to ask for the interview Ken and I recorded not long ago on marriage. It’s just a small way of encouraging on you and your spouse.
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P.O. Box 3333, Agoura Hills, CA 91376