I don’t want to be a whiner, I don’t want to be a complainer, but today is just one of those days ’cause I woke up this morning with the weight of my quadriplegia heavy on my heart. It can happen when I feel the crunch of pain from deteriorating cervical discs in my neck. But wait, please. I'm not sharing this to burden you or make you feel sorry for me. No way!
I'm sharing this to tell you exactly what I am doing about my weariness and frustration with this paralysis I face every day. And I want to share this in hopes that it will encourage you to deal with your own headaches.
Because it’s on days like these that I remember something that Corrie Ten Boom said years ago. Corrie is the Christian woman who rescued many Dutch Jews from the World War II death camps when she and her family hid them in her home in Holland. Corrie Ten Boom suffered greatly for doing that and she, herself, was thrown into one of those death camps. Anyway! She once wrote, “You may never know that Jesus is all you need, until Jesus is all you have.” Oh friend, that speaks to me today. Because there’s nothing I can do to reach this pain… no one can really help me reach it… no amount of Advil, no amount of aspirin… no amount of shifting or pushing or tightening my binder or corset that I wear to help me breathe…
When it gets like this, Jesus is all I have – but that reinforces my faith and strengthens my weary soul and what do you know, I discover Jesus is all I need. Acts 17:28 says that everything moves and breathes and has its being in our Savior. He is at the center of the whole universe. And friend, if you are the one at that center holding everything together, then you can do no more than offer yourself. And that’s what Jesus Christ does when we are hurting – in the midst of our pain… in the midst of your hardships, would you please listen today, begin to realize Jesus is all you need because Jesus is all you have.
He’s all any of us have. What have we in heaven or earth beside him, it says in the Psalms. Where can we go to, where can we turn to find something or someone better? Psalm 139 puts it this way, “If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there God’s hand’s going to guide me. God’s right hand will hold me fast.” Jesus is there. And Jesus is here right now, with you… the Man of Sorrows and the Lord of Heaven and Earth… He’s not some meditating of a mystic, guru of a God… Jesus is all you have. And you know what? I want you to believe with me today – I mean believe, take this by faith and move into this marvelous truth that Jesus is all you need. It’s enough to carry me to the end of this day and beyond.
Used by permission of
JONI AND FRIENDS
P.O. Box 3333
Agoura Hills, CA 93176
www.joniandfriends.org
© Joni and Friends