A quadriplegic painter, musician, writer, disability activist, and writer, Joni Eareckson Tada, testified how God has turned the impossible into possible.
Joni Eareckson Tada
Joni opened up in this video to share her life testimony, from childhood to her diving accident to her faith in Jesus and His purposes.
She grew up in a very athletic family, and she also grew up listening to the stories of the heroes of faith.
“My earliest memory of hearing about the God of the Bible, though, was around the campfire on the beach of the Delaware shore with my sisters, mom, and dad. Hearing stories of Noah, David, Moses, and Daniel. But God really… He really wasn’t very personal,” she said.
But all that changed when she turned 14 years old.
“We went away on a kind of a church weekend retreat. I was challenged by the speaker. He said, “Kids, I want to measure your lives up against the Ten Commandments,”” she recalled.
Joni Eareckson Tada Talks About Faith
After that camp, she reassessed herself. “Well, I had never committed adultery, or I don’t think I stole anything in a big way. But you know what? It didn’t matter because I measured my life up against those commandments one by one. I got this overwhelming sense that I’m missing the mark. I’m not going to make it.”
But after all the questions in her heart, God helped her understand what the Gospel really meant.
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“It troubled me at first that God gave us a bunch of commandments that He knew very well we couldn’t keep. But then, it hit me. At that weekend retreat, it hit me. That’s why Jesus came. He was the One who kept the commandments. He was the One who obeyed the law even though I didn’t know I could,” she said.
Accepting Jesus
Furthermore, she acknowledged her need for Jesus: “I was only 14 but I was able to reach out right then and embrace Jesus and say, “I need You. I want to make it out of earth alive. And You’re my only passport, so please.”
But a major accident made her question God again. Weeks before going to college, her sister invited her to go to the beach.
And something terrible happened.
“I swam out to this raft; the athlete that I was, I didn’t even touch bottom. Hoisted myself onto it, then took this really stupid dive into what ended up being extremely shallow water. I snapped my head back when I hit rock bottom. And it crunched my fourth cervical vertebra, severed my spinal cord. There I was lying first down in the water, desperately hoping that my sister Kathy would please notice that I had not resurfaced from my dive,” she recalled painfully.
The doctors told her she had to sit down for the rest of her life.
But God had better plans. Watch the full story below:
Header image: Joni Eareckson Tada [Joni and Friends]. YouTube, 29 January 2023, https://youtu.be/VVXJ8GyLgt0
