Joni Eareckson Tada: Sharing Hope

Shana: I'm Shana with Joni Eareckson Tada: Sharing Hope. Thanks for listening today. Joni, no one likes to suffer.

Joni Eareckson Tada: We certainly don't. Shana, I've lived almost six decades in this wheelchair and every day is a challenge. There is never any respite from it. It is hard.

Shana: It is hard. But hard as it is, and Joni, I've seen you in pain, God has used His left hand of Providence, as we sometimes call it. He's used your quadriplegia to draw you much closer to Himself, and I've seen that too.

Joni Eareckson Tada: Shana, you know me well. I can say without a doubt, with no second guessing, that—here comes my favorite line—I'd rather be in this wheelchair knowing Jesus as I do than to be on my feet without Him. I came to that realization decades ago, but those words are as true now as ever. It seems that the longer and harder my affliction, the better I know my Lord Jesus.

I never used to call Him mine in prayer. For me, it is most often, "Oh, my Jesus, how good You are," rather than just, "Oh, Jesus, how good You are." Suffering has made Him mine. It is as though the furnace of affliction, as it says in Isaiah 48, is where God has burned away and continues to purify and burn out of my life sin, self-centeredness, self-pity, worldly thoughts and ways, the itchiness to have things as I want them, and much more.

That furnace of suffering has not only burned away the dross; the heat of my trials bonds me in a deeper union with Jesus Christ. I have a long way to go, but I sense that my suffering has melded my relationship into Jesus. You know what I mean by melding? It is when you start to disappear into the Lord, as Romans 6:11 says where you must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.

That is melding. Suffering has helped me to consider myself dead to sin, and it has made me gladly hand over more of me to Jesus Christ. Less of my old self and more of me in Christ. This wheelchair has been the furnace of affliction in which that marvelous bond is being strengthened.

Someone with a disability wrote about suffering and how it changes us, and they wrote it as a poem. I wish I could tell you the author, but this person wrote: "I'd rather have a paralyzed body and be able to move in the spirit. I'd rather be blind to the colors of a sunset and be able to see the light of God. I'd rather lack intellectual skill and be able to comprehend the simplicity of God's love."

"I'd rather be deaf to melodies of this life and be able to hear God call my name. I'd rather have only a partial physical frame and be part of Christ's body. May my brokenness be a door to my enlightenment and may what others consider a disability serve as my ability to experience God's faithfulness."

Shana: Joni, that is beautiful. The author of that bit of prose obviously went through the furnace of affliction. It is clear. Her suffering helped her consider herself dead to sin and utterly and completely alive to God.

Listening friend, perhaps you identify with what Joni has shared today. If you have questions about it, go to joniradio.org and click the "Ask Joni" button. We could sum up today's topic with the words of David in Psalm 119:67. He writes from the furnace of his suffering: "Before I was afflicted I went astray, but now I keep Your word."