Finding Meaning in Suffering

“Suffering can cause a person to become better or bitter,” someone said. That statement causes me to think of Joni Eareckson Tada, whom I met years ago.

Tada, a quadriplegic, once thanked God for her wheelchair, saying, “By tasting hell in this life, I’ve been driven to think seriously about what faces me in the next. This paralysis is my greatest mercy.”

Some time ago, I saw Tada’s smiling face photo-featured with a “Christianity Today” (CT) magazine article titled “A Heaven-Made Activist,” a story about Tada by CT senior writer Tim Stafford.

As an athletic, horse-loving 17 year-old in July 1967, Tada experienced a Chesapeake Bay diving accident injury that left her paralyzed from the neck down.

“I felt my head hit something hard and unyielding,” she wrote in “Joni,” her 1976 biography. “My body sprawled out of control. I heard or felt a loud electric buzzing, an unexplainable inner sensation.”

During Tada’s two years in a hospital she asked friends to help her commit suicide, but they declined. During that time, Tada met Steve Estes, a Christian teenager three years her junior, who helped her study the Bible and arrive at the classic Reform belief that her injury wasn’t “just an accident.”

“Scripture taught Tada that her soul was infinitely more important than her body,” Stafford says.

A quadriplegic for 40 years, Tada, who married Ken Tada 25 years ago, has inspired many through her “Joni and Friends” organization headquartered in Agoura Hills, Calif. She speaks publicly and produces a daily radio program, books and graphic art. She draws and signs her autograph by manipulating a pen held between her teeth.

I met Tada in the early 1980s when she autographed some copies of “Joni” at a Greenville, S.C. bookstore. Days later, my wife and I took Peyton Hines, a now-deceased paraplegic friend of ours who lived in Greer, S.C., to hear Tada speak at an evening meeting at Greenville’s Furman University.

As a young man, Hines, using a textile mill lift truck that lacked an operator protection bar, was hoisting a large “bolt” of cloth when that roll of fabric fell on him, crushed his back and left him paralyzed from the waist down.

Hines, who often led devotional meetings for his fellow nursing home residents, said he believed his accident brought him into a better relationship with God.

While introducing Hines to Tada after her Furman meeting, I, towering above their wheelchairs, felt a momentary sense of isolation. I realized, as their eyes met, that I knew little about their “fellowship of suffering.”

Tada says she was headed down a self-destructive path before her accident; she proposes that God often permits suffering to enter our lives to drive us to him.

“I was checking out a birth-control clinic to get some pills, because I knew I’d be sleeping with my boyfriend in college,” Tada says. “Somewhere in that mess of emotions and regrets and falterings and failings, while making a sham of my Christian faith, somewhere in the desperation I said, ‘God, rescue me.’ And he did. I believe my accident was a direct answer.”

In her book “The God I Love,” she says, “There are more important things in life than walking.”

Tada is dependent on assistants and has bones “about as dense as an 85-year-old’s,” but she avoids bitterness, chooses a better path and inspires others as she moves forward in life.

Someone said, “The same sun that melts wax hardens clay.”

I like these words from an old hymn: “Spirit of the living God, fall fresh on me / Melt me, mold me, fill me, use me / Spirit of the Living God, fall fresh on me.” And the Psalmist tells us: “He heals the broken in heart and binds up their wounds” (Psalm 147:3).

Father, make us moldable and adaptable and cause your love to shine through us, no matter what happens to us. Amen.