Joni & Ken

by Ken Eareckson Tada

  Ken had never imagined such a scene, and it was still difficult to comprehend that he was a part of it all. These people — even if they spoke a different language, followed unfamiliar customs, and lived in circumstances wildly different from his own — were his brothers and sisters in Jesus. He couldn’t shake the thought that he had more in common, much closer ties, to these Christian strangers than he had with his non-Christian next-door neighbors in his Burbank condo.

  Pastor Sarac said a few words of introduction in Romanian, one of the most beautiful languages Joni had ever heard. Someone had described it to her as “a blend of strong, confident Slavic tempered with the passionate, rhythmic flow of a Romance language, complete with the rolling r’s!” When the pastor led the assembly in a hymn, the music was simply stunning. Sweet and strong, robust and wrung from the deep places of the soul. It had all the passion and suppressed Slavonic longing of a Dvorák melody, but ran deeper still.

  Tears filled Joni’s eyes. This was the song of the persecuted church.

  Seven years later, a peaceful protest around a pastor’s home in Timisoara would help launch the Romanian revolution.

  After the introductions, Ken wheeled Joni’s chair to the front, and she turned to face the crowd for the first time. Immediately, women and children surged forward with bouquets of flowers, placing them in her lap and all around her wheelchair. And there to her left and to her right, on the floor between the pews and the platform, were people with disabilities. Some lay on thin mattresses and mats or sat in homemade wheelchairs constructed of bicycle parts … the blind and the deaf, the lame and the mentally challenged, men and women with twisted legs and spines. She recognized those with polio, spina bifida, and cerebral palsy, all straining to see their American counterpart. And how many more, huddled in sodden coats, hats, and blankets outside in the rain, were hoping to hear something, see something, that might bring a little hope into their dreary lives?

  Yes, Romania had its disabled population, all right. They had simply been shunned and hidden away in back rooms, attics, and basements; frowned at and despised in public; forbidden to ever enter a hotel, restaurant, or market — their very existence denied by a megalomaniac dictator.

  That night in the hotel, Judy and Jay unloaded pockets and purses stuffed with tightly folded pieces of paper, piling them on the bed. Ken and Joni had been given notes too, which they added to the growing heap. They sat up that night reading many of them, desperate stories of people, all pleading in halting English for hope or help. A few asked for knowledge of medical cures for “our mongoloid child” or spinal cord injury or stroke or psychotic problems. One said, “Can you help my son who is a spastic?” Another note read: “My daughter needs a wheelchair, please?”

  After a while, and without words, the four of them looked at each other, the same thought occurring to all of them. Maybe we can do some good here — return with wheelchairs and crutches … perhaps bring Bibles or my books in the Romanian language … could this be why God brought us here?

  At that time, few people in the West knew anything about the hidden population of disabled men, women, and children in Ceausescu’s Romania. But now … they all felt as if a mantle had been laid on their shoulders, a burden of responsibility they could not, and would not, ignore.

  God had not forgotten His most vulnerable children in this beleaguered land. When Jesus addressed His letter to Pergamum in the book of Revelation, He might as well have been speaking of the Christians in Romania: “I know where you live — where Satan has his throne. Yet you remain true to my name” (Revelation 2:13).

  Now He had brought them there, Ken and Joni, Jay and Judy, and they had looked into the eyes of Romania’s suffering believers.

  They wouldn’t forget.

  And somehow, they would be back.

  Next stop, Poland. It might have been a tightly controlled Communist state with its own cadre of secret police, but compared to the dark, nearly demonic oppression of Romania, it felt almost light and airy.

  Joni spoke before churches in towns with names like Katowice and Wroclaw, and together they presented the gospel of Jesus Christ to disabled people at rehabilitation centers.

  At one church, noisy and packed to capacity, Ken and Joni prayed together behind a flimsy wooden screen before rolling out in front of the crowded pews. He gripped her lifeless fingers, praying that the Holy Spirit would speak through them to the curious, excited, and eager men, women, and children who filled the auditorium to capacity.

  She had been in similar places on similar nights in different parts of the world, but tonight was different. Tonight, Ken was there. Her husband-to-be. It wasn’t just Joni; it was Ken and Joni. And as they prayed together, she felt a new strength and confidence. For Ken, it was yet another glimpse into the future. So this is what it will be like …

  Joni peeked out from behind the screen into the faces of the people of Poland. Farmers with their families. Steelworkers and miners. Little boys who tugged at each other and bumped one another’s shoulders. Young women with brightly colored kerchiefs, spots of blue and red and yellow dotted throughout a crowd dressed mostly in heavy dark coats and sweaters.

  Two older women squeezed together on the front pew, their heads thinly framed in tight black scarves. For an instant, she saw them as she might have painted them, with faces lined and weary, yet full rosy cheeks and sparkling blue eyes. They were looking expectantly at their pastor, as did everyone else, whether jammed into the pews or standing in the middle and side aisles, listening to his introductory remarks.

  It seemed so loud that night, even though no one but the pastor was talking. It occurred to Joni that the din was from hundreds of coats, scarves, shoes, canes, and crutches crowding and rustling against one another. The cold plaster walls of the church echoed the sound off the high wooden ceiling. It was a chilly night outside, yet in the church the air was tight, hot, and humid. And charged with excitement.

  A young man, probably afflicted with some form of multiple sclerosis, sat humped over in his pea jacket, his hands twisting a handkerchief. His wheelchair was very, very, old, the drab green leather worn and torn. The wheels were different sizes, as though he had pieced together mismatching parts, perhaps cannibalizing foot pedals and armrests from other, even older chairs.

  The bright, scrubbed face of a young girl looked on, her lips full, naturally pink, and parted in a mild and gentle smile. Joni pointed her out to Ken. “Look at her eyes!” she said. Ken nodded. Her eyes were absolutely glowing. “She knows Jesus,” Joni said. “I’m sure of it.” She was sitting in a molded orange plastic chair someone had placed at the end of the first pew and leaned on a black cane. Her spindly thin calves were encased in old leg braces — probably a polio survivor.

  Joni couldn’t help but glance down at her own wheelchair, each aluminum spoke gleaming and clean, her seat outfitted with an expensive black cushion. She had already met many people with disabilities in Poland who sat on old couch cushions in their wheelchairs, or perhaps doubled-up feather pillows. She felt like she was about to drive a shiny new Mercedes into a street filled with ancient Pontiacs and battered Studebakers. She was suddenly very glad she had worn a plain woolen sweater that night, and that her hair had been simply styled. The last thing she wanted to look like in front of these people was glamorous. Without even thinking about it, she began to rub the blush off her cheeks with her sweater sleeve.

  Guessing what she was thinking, Ken reached around her neck, tilted her head back, and kissed her. It was reassurance like no one else could have given her in that moment. How glad she was to have him there with her!

  In the next moment, he wheeled her onto the platform and parked her chair next to the woman who would translate their message. The noise in the church increased as people slid forward in their seats or jostled in the aisles to get a better view.

  Ken was still in awe of Joni’s fame. Here they were in Communist Poland, and many of these people had seen her movie or read her books i
n Polish. And now … here he was at her side, and part of that picture. In his younger years, he would have never imagined such a thing. You just never knew what life would bring when you surrendered it to serving the Lord.

  Joni and Ken traded shy, nervous smiles with the audience, and then he walked off the platform. She began to speak, finding her cadence with the translator. Love, concern, and joy seemed to radiate from her in waves. What an amazing gift she had with an audience! He could see her enthusiasm reflected in the faces looking on intently. They were warmed by her, encouraged just to be near her. A wizened old woman in a front pew nodded and smiled, drinking in every word. The young disabled girl in the orange chair leaned forward on her cane, smiling with confidence and hope.

  After Joni’s message, Ken rejoined her on the platform and began speaking about their upcoming marriage, with its challenges and joys. Having a translator isn’t a bad experience, he told himself. It gave him time to collect his thoughts a little.

  Ken quoted 2 Corinthians 12:9 – 10, relating how Joni’s disability had become a weakness about which to boast, allowing God’s power to rest on their lives. He had used those words before, but on that night in Poland, they seemed almost electric with meaning, and he watched, or sensed, people nodding their heads in acknowledgment.

  As he spoke, Joni thought to herself, But they mustn’t think of us as extraordinary or heroic. They mustn’t think of me that way — a celebrity from the West with wings on her wheelchair who smiles and paints and writes and sings. I must find a way to tell them more clearly how we struggle with so many things and fall short so often, just as they do.

  For that night, however, it was enough that they had brought words of blessing and hope from a distant America — and a Savior who wasn’t distant at all.

  Since both Ken and Joni were history buffs and interested in events surrounding World War II, they took advantage of the opportunity to visit the site of a Nazi concentration camp — Auschwitz-Birkenau — in Poland.

  It ended up being a more jarring experience than either of them had anticipated. What stuck in Joni’s mind in years to come, however, were the wildflowers.

  In Auschwitz, at the site and around the museum, and in Birkenau, where the evidence of the camp had fallen away, the grounds were carpeted with tiny white daisies. There seemed to be untold thousands of them, poking up through the new spring grass, nodding delicate heads in the breezes.

  “Do you suppose the government plants them?” Joni whispered to Ken, out of earshot from their Polish hosts, who were guiding them.

  Ken shook his head. “I don’t know. Maybe not. Maybe God planted them. Anything bright helps in this place.”

  In spite of the wildflowers and the intervening years, Auschwitz was a chilling, depressing place.

  Joni noticed a row of lovely rose bushes planted just yards away from the gas chambers. Obviously, those had been planted. Their guide nodded yes, observing that there had certainly been no flowers when Auschwitz was in operation. Every wildflower, every blade of grass, was plucked clean, right down to the naked clay, by starving prisoners. They ate everything that grew, trying to stay alive.

  To Joni, the carpet of daisies seemed like a covering of God’s grace over a scene of inconceivable horror … or perhaps a memorial.

  Inside the museum, one of the first displays was housed in a large room behind glass, filled with piles and piles of prosthetic legs, walkers, crutches, canes, and everything else that any person with a disability might have had when he or she had come to that place.

  The disabled were always the first to die.

  Years later, Joni would learn that when Nazi “medical” teams across the Third Reich began doing their gruesome experiments on “low value” people, they began by pulling people with mental and physical problems out of various institutions and carting them off in the night to their laboratories. But not just anyone. At least initially they only chose people who had no visitors, no family or friends coming to see them. The Nazis reasoned that people without advocates were easy marks because no one would notice or care if they went missing. Disabled people like Joni had been labeled as “useless bread gobblers.”

  How incredibly sad, she had thought. And she felt an overwhelming sense of gratitude for her family, and especially for Ken, her husband-to-be. I have an advocate, she thought. Someone who will be there for me and stand up for me, no matter what. For the rest of her life, as long as Ken lived, she had an advocate, a champion … and a friend.

  Auschwitz contained every horror she had ever read about. Bare bricks and barbed wire … storehouses of eyeglasses and gold teeth, canes and crutches, shoes, hearing aids … stacks of yellowed and dusty record books bearing neatly inscribed names … gallows and guard towers … even the ominous chimneys and the ovens.

  But she hadn’t expected the flowers. The tiny little wisps of white innocence, carpeting the grounds.

  They journeyed the short distance from Auschwitz to Birkenau. Here, trainloads of Jews and dissidents had been emptied out into the freezing night to face the machine guns of pitiless and soul-dead men. Children were gun-butted one way; their mothers herded the other. Men were separated into groups of the old and young. But virtually all of them, millions of them, ended up in one place — the incinerator, now crumbled and overgrown — at the end of the camp.

  Nothing was left standing at Birkenau. Their hosts explained that what appeared to be orderly rows of heaps of brick were once the smokestacks of wooden barracks. Nothing remained of the guard towers. Even the train tracks and railroad ties were gone, uprooted or simply moldered away.

  Joni shivered, but not from the cold. The camps were stark reminders that wherever Satan ruled in the world, people weren’t valued as those who bear the stamp of God’s image. Only “useful,”

  able-bodied lives had any value. The message of the Nazis — and Ceausescu’s Romania — was that “you are better off dead than disabled. We don’t need people like you.”

  But Ken needed her.

  How wonderful to be needed. Wanted. Cherished. Loved for something more than physical “usefulness.”

  She dropped her gaze to the daisies Ken had tucked into the straps of her arm splints. And smiled. Her advocate.

  The children of their Polish hosts had remained in the van during the tours of the death camps, absorbed in playing Mario Bros. games on their Nintendos. It made Ken, the teacher, thoughtful. Was that the attitude of the coming generation? Absorbed in the latest gadget coming out of the West, with no interest in learning about the terrible historical events that occurred only miles from where they lived? How quickly would the terrible lessons of history fade?

  In Athens, just before flying home, they had been invited to attend the Greek premiere of the Joni movie.

  Organizers of the event sent a big black Mercedes to pick them up at the hotel. At the theater, a large group of Joni admirers crowded around the car as the driver and Ken fetched her wheelchair from the trunk. Ken was dazed by the spotlight, flashbulbs, and the excited murmur of the crowd. I can’t believe this, he told himself. I’m marrying a movie star. Where’s the red carpet? He lifted her out of the car, and Joni emerged, smiling and waving to the friendly crowd, just as if she’d done it a million times before. As they picked her up, however, the clamp on her leg bag broke, releasing its contents on the sidewalk.

  Well, well, Joni thought to herself, I must have been letting this international movie premiere thing go to my head a little. Thanks, Father, for helping me keep things in perspective!

  Before they left town, everyone wanted to see the Parthenon, and no one really imagined it would be wheelchair accessible! Ken’s weight training, however, combined with a good dose of a history teacher’s excited adrenaline, enabled him to carry Joni all 150 steps to the magnificent ruins at the crown of the Acropolis.

  There, late in the afternoon, Ken held his bride-to-be, looking out over Athens and the Aegean Sea and Sea of Crete in the misty distance. What a trip this
had been! How could he ever look at life in the same way again?

  They looked out as far as they could see in all directions. If you stayed there long enough, lingering from sunset to moonrise, you could watch the columns of the Parthenon turn from beige to golden to rose to stark white.

  Maybe so … but Ken was ready to find a restaurant and order a plate of sizzling soutzoukakia.

  Carrying fiancées up hilltops was hungry work.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  AT THE ALTAR

  Never be afraid to trust

  an unknown future to a known God.

  CORRIE TEN BOOM

  JUNE 15, 1982

  In the days before their wedding, Joni saw all that a bride-to-be would hope to see in the eyes of her groom.

  Love. Longing. Quiet strength. Nervous excitement. Sheer joy. But she also saw something else, something that concerned her.

  Ken idealized her.

  He had a bright, shining image of her in his mind, and he’d had it since he first saw her in person at the Young Life banquet in Burbank. He’d told her how he’d wanted to meet her and talk to her that night but hadn’t had a chance with all the people crowding around. He had read her biographies (Joni and A Step Further), watched her in televised Billy Graham crusades, and had just recently seen her movie.

  She understood the “Joni persona thing,” and how that tended to skew people’s perceptions of her. Because of what she had been through in life and how she had endured it, people wanted to make her into Saint Joni. This was the legendary young woman who always smiled and bravely faced any crisis with triumphant faith, the one whose wheelchair hovered just a few inches above the ground as she sailed through life. This was in spite of the fact that in her books and devotionals she had tried hard to poke holes in that inflated, bigger-than-life image. She had done her best to be authentic and transparent, to show people that she was a sinner, that she dealt with pride, pettiness, lust, jealousy, and anger — just like everyone else on the planet.