To herself she thought, I wish Ken was here. He was right; he was right, and I wish I had listened to him. He warned me, but I wouldn’t listen. He really does love me. I need to listen to him. I need to quit fighting him …
A flight attendant stopped in the aisle. “Don’t worry,” she said. “We’ve called ahead for an ambulance. They’ll be waiting for you at the gate.” By the time they arrived at the Baltimore airport, it was dark. After everyone deplaned, paramedics rushed on board and lifted Joni onto a gurney.
Judy was troubled. “I can’t believe this,” she said. “I won’t even be able to go with you to the hospital. Someone has to take Dr. Zhang Xu and his mother to the hotel. They have no idea what to do.”
“That’s OK,” Joni said, trying to ease her friend’s anxiety. They quickly parted, Judy heading to baggage claim with the other two, and Joni down a side exit to the hospital. When the ambulance pulled up to the emergency entrance, Joni thought the place looked vaguely familiar.
“Where are we?” she asked the paramedic.
“Anne Arundel County General Hospital,” he replied.
And Joni was dumbfounded. I can’t believe this! This is the hospital they brought me to after I broke my neck that day!
Thirty-seven years suddenly melted away. She was back in Baltimore, back in the very same emergency room where they had rushed her in, slapped an oxygen mask on her, shouted orders, and shoved her onto an examination table. It was the same room where they brought her as a teenager, so afraid and bewildered.
But not now. She smiled, in spite of herself. All of those years of walking with Jesus had marked her—with peace. Even though she was without her husband or friends, an inexplicable sense of well-being settled over her. Dr. Zhang Xu and his mother would be well cared for, and if she couldn’t speak at Lancaster Bible College—well, they would call on a substitute graduation speaker who would have precisely the message those students needed to hear. And that honorary doctorate they wanted to present her with? It was nice, but some other time would work just as well.
All had been anticipated, all was in His hand, and all was well. She could settle back in God’s sovereignty like a comfortable blanket.
Even when X-rays confirmed that Joni had broken her leg, she felt calmed by an overwhelming sense of God’s presence. It was as if He had brought her here. Alone. In a cubicle behind drawn hospital curtains.
Why, Lord? Why here? Was it a reminder of His faithfulness to her through the long years … how He had met with her in this place way back then, and was still at her side today?
In the dim light of her little cubicle, she looked around and saw all the expected things: a bedside table, an IV stand, a blood pressure monitor. Outside, beyond the curtains, she could hear the all-too-familiar murmur of a hospital at night — rolling carts in the hall, the sleepy chirps and beeps of monitoring devices, the soft sounds of nurses’ shoes on linoleum.
But there was more. So very much more. The presence of Jesus was here, more real and tangible than anything else. That was enough for her. Forever enough.
A nurse briskly parted the curtain and entered, holding a cell phone. “We reached your husband,” she said. “Here, let me hold this up to your ear.”
“Joni? Are you OK?!”
Ken’s voice was urgent and anxious. “Listen, Joni, I’m coming right away … I’ll be on the earliest flight out of here I can get!” “Oh, Ken, you really don’t have to. I’ll be OK. Honestly, they’re taking good care of me.” Joni tried to ease his concern, but she knew it was pointless.
“No, I’m coming. And Joni?” There was a pause. “… I am so very sorry. This is all my fault, and I am so sorry.”
His fault? she thought. I don’t think so.
His voice trembled—and was filled with tenderness. “I should never have let you go,” he said. “I knew better. And I shouldn’t have been sitting here in my easy chair reading David Baldacci when you really needed me.”
Suddenly, Joni desperately missed him. It was a homesickness for her husband like she had never experienced before. We belong together … We shouldn’t be apart. Her voice weakened. “Then please … yes … please come. Oh, Ken, I really do want you here.”
They hung up. Joni looked up and smiled at the nurse, who was preparing gauze and plaster to set her leg.
“My husband’s coming for me,” she said with a soft smile. It felt good to say those words, as though she were somebody’s beauty to be rescued.
“That’s good,” the nurse replied. “Every husband should be with his wife at a time like this.”
I know, Joni mused, and it feels so wonderful that Ken really, really wants to be by my side. Quadriplegia, broken leg, whatever.
It was 3:00 a.m. by the time Judy had gotten Dr. Zhang Xu and his mother settled into their hotel and drove out to see Joni. Walking into the hospital room, Judy was a little surprised to be greeted with a happy smile.
“Didn’t you hate being here all alone? Weren’t you afraid?” Judy asked when she reached Joni’s bedside.
“There was a time when I was afraid in this place,” Joni said. “It was about thirty-seven years ago. They brought me here — right here — from the beach where I had broken my neck. But no, not now. I wasn’t afraid. God has brought me a long way since then.”
The nurse, touching up her work on the cast, gave a wry smile. “A long way indeed,” she said. “I read your book when I was in nursing school.”
On the way back to the hotel, Joni softly sang the hymn God had put on her heart. That night, she had been trying to think of a hymn about feet. Finally, as they casted her leg, it came to her.
Lord, lift me up and let me stand,
By faith, on Heaven’s tableland,
A higher plane than I have found;
Lord, plant my feet on higher ground.11
It became her broken leg litany the next day as they drove to Pennsylvania, a constant melody reminding her of God’s protection and provision through the trip. The following day, with her cast leg raised on her wheelchair foot pedal, she wheeled onto the platform of Lancaster Bible College. The graduation ceremony was about to begin, and in just moments, she would give her speech. But first, the audience rose to its feet to sing the graduation hymn.
Lord, lift me up and let me stand,
By faith, on Heaven’s tableland,
A higher plane than I have found;
Lord, plant my feet on higher ground.
It was the same hymn. But why should that surprise her? Or why should it surprise her when the college president opened the ceremony with the reading of Hebrews 12:12 – 13: “Therefore, strengthen your feeble arms and weak knees. Make level paths for your feet, so that the lame may not be disabled, but rather healed.”
Yes, he could have chosen those verses because of Joni’s wheelchair. But she knew differently.
Ken squeezed Joni’s shoulder. The meaning of both the hymn and the Bible verses was not lost on them. There was more that needed healing in their lives than a broken leg. But the same God who knit bones together could also mend deeper fractures than that.
Ken had an adventure to live, a battle to fight, and a beauty to rescue. And yes, she really did need rescuing.
“It’s a new day,” Ken whispered to his wife. “A new day. I promise.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
STEPPING UP
As servants of God we commend ourselves in every way:
in great endurance; in troubles, hardships and distresses …
in hard work, sleepless nights …
in purity, understanding, patience and kindness;
in the Holy Spirit and in sincere love …
2 CORINTHIANS 6:4–6
JUNE 2007
On another fly-fishing adventure at Trude Lake, Jan challenged Ken and another small group of men with the same thing John Eldredge had told them to do back in 2004: Get away by yourself and see if God has something to say to you.
Well, here we go again, Ken
thought.
He followed a trail to the upper part of the reservoir by the dam and found a wide rock warmed by the summer sunshine. Sitting down, he looked up into the deep vault of the wilderness sky and said, “Well, Father, here I am again. Your son Ken Tada. Is there anything You want to say to me?”
And this time, to Ken’s considerable surprise, there was.
It hadn’t been an audible voice, but it was absolutely clear, piercing his thoughts like a sudden shaft of sunlight. And he had no doubt who was speaking.
“Joni is the most precious gift I have given to you. You take care of her.”
OK … Ken listened to see if there was more to the message, but apparently that was it. Take care of Joni? But … hadn’t he been doing that, for all these years? What exactly did the Lord mean? That he should do more? That he shouldn’t delegate so much? This was around the time when Joni’s chronic pain issues had reached new and urgent levels, a situation that was emotionally and physically draining for both of them. Was that what God had been talking to him about? Supporting Joni in her pain? He wasn’t sure. He told himself it was something he would have done anyway.
Even so, it certainly seemed like the Lord was challenging him to step up, to take on some new level of responsibility concerning Joni. What did that mean?
When he came home, he told her about the experience. She wasn’t sure what to make of it either, but just hearing him tell the story gave her a lift. Was this signaling some kind of change in their marriage? Something fresh in the wind? A hint of something to come? Or was it all just wishful thinking?
Time would tell, she decided.
MAY 2010
In the spring of 2010, on another Wild Adventure excursion, this time to Abaco in the Bahamas, Ken studied a new John Eldredge book with another group of men. During their discussion time, Ken told the guys about a personal decision he had made.
When he got back home, he intended to take one full day a week for a month to just “listen to God,” and then to journal whatever he heard. And that’s what he had done. At first, he found it very difficult to concentrate. He would be sitting out in the backyard, hearing cars on the street, planes buzzing overhead, and even rock music from his neighbor’s stereo. Then, over time, those noises had strangely receded, and all he could remember hearing were the birds.
He had felt very close to God that month. Closer than he could ever remember.
It’s not that he heard God speak every time, but the communication line was certainly open. The sense of closeness with his heavenly Father, however, was all he could have asked for. It wasn’t like those old days in high school during football practice when he had recognized his dad at a distance watching him through the chain-link fence but making no effort to greet or acknowledge his son. Not so much as a lifted hand. No, this was a Father who came near, just as He promised in Scripture: “Come near to God and he will come near to you” (James 4:8).
Ken had set his heart to do that — to come as near to God as he could.
In June, Joni received her diagnosis of breast cancer. And when Ken went to his backyard sanctuary to hear from the Lord, he found the line to heaven still open. God spoke a message of deep comfort. Ken heard the same words again and again. “Be not afraid.”
He was so grateful that the Lord had drawn him into that quiet place again and again over the past month. He didn’t have to go looking for the Lord in this time of heartbreak; Ken knew right where He would be.
And He was.
Then the words came back to him: “Joni is the most precious gift I have given to you. Take care of her.”
“I will take care of her, Lord,” he told Him through tears. “I promise.”
And he did.
JUNE 2010
For as long as he possibly could, Ken had wanted to keep one foot in the twilight zone of denial.
When he felt the lump on Joni’s breast, he had thought to himself, Maybe it’s something else.
On the drive to the radiology clinic in Thousand Oaks, he reasoned, Maybe this isn’t what it looks like.
The next morning at the clinic, the technician on the mammogram had only said, “We will need an ultrasound.” An irregularity, he thought. Maybe nothing more.
After the ultrasound technician said, “This looks suspicious. You need to make an appointment with an oncologist,” he thought, Maybe this is benign.
They did a needle biopsy, and the oncologist said, “I think we’ll have to operate.” He said to himself, No one has actually said it’s cancer. Maybe it isn’t cancer. They don’t really know yet. Not for sure.
Reality wasn’t his friend in those days, and he didn’t want to think about it. It was as if something had been knocking, knocking, knocking on his front door, but he was afraid to open it. If he answered the door, then he would know what it was, and he didn’t want to know what it was. He could ignore the knocking, fill his mind with something else. He could tell himself that the knocking was only the wind or the house settling, or that they had a woodpecker up in the eaves. He could tell himself there had always been a knocking sound like that, and he could just ignore it, and maybe, eventually, it would go away.
For Joni, answering the door was no problem at all. In fact, she hurried to the door.
She had been in such dreadful, mind-numbing pain that she welcomed this intrusion into their lives. Any change was positive — even a negative one. Her first thought had been, My prayers are answered. God is about to deliver me. Who wanted to live another twenty-five or thirty years with the kind of pain she had been enduring? Life had become like walking in knee-deep mud. Taking one step forward, sinking up to her knees, pulling her leg out, taking another step forward, pulling her next leg out … Slogging. That wasn’t anything to look forward to. That wasn’t life.
So maybe the cancer would take her quickly. How long did it take? Six months? A year? And then … release! It would be like looking forward to a Caribbean cruise. Only heaven was a billion times better than anywhere on earth. Yes, there would be some suffering, but what was that compared to what she had already faced? Could it really get any worse? Hadn’t she prayed and prayed for some change in her status? She had cried aloud to the Lord for help, like David had done in Psalm 40:1 – 2:
I waited patiently for the LORD;
he turned to me and heard my cry.
He lifted me out of the slimy pit,
out of the mud and mire;
he set my feet on a rock
and gave me a firm place to stand.
In this case, “the mud and mire” was a life wracked with constant pain. And what firmer place to stand — stand, not sit in a wheelchair or lie in a bed — was there than heaven, in His presence?
Her depression over her pain completely lifted the day she found out she had cancer. It was going to work out all right after all. There is an end to this. Just one more brief battle, and then — freedom! It wasn’t a death wish; it was a LIFE wish. Paul had said the same thing, hadn’t he? He wrote to the Corinthians, “These earthly bodies make us groan and sigh … We want to slip into our new bodies so that these dying bodies will, as it were, be swallowed up by everlasting life. This is what God has prepared for us” (2 Corinthians 5:4 – 5 LB).
Slip into our new bodies. What a happy picture! She could almost remember how it felt as a girl when she slipped into a cool, freshly laundered cotton T-shirt on a bright summer morning. How, then, would it feel to step out of her old, pain-wracked, useless body into a fresh, clean, new one? And then run barefoot out into some heavenly meadow in the morning light, the cool dew blessing her feet, the trade winds of glory caressing her hair.
Paul had also stated, “I desire to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far” (Philippians 1:23).
She could easily lose herself in such thoughts. Heaven thoughts. They had helped her endure a thousand nights of pain, when sleep seemed out of reach. She’d written a book on heaven. She had dreamed about heaven for years and years. And now … what
if the departure date was actually on the calendar? What if her ticket was actually booked? An e-ticket. All she had to do was wheel up to the gate and get on board.
When she thought about it, there was really only one thing that kept her from hurrying as fast as she could to catch that departing flight.
Ken.
She wasn’t just “Joni” anymore. She had been joined, body and soul, to another. He was her soul mate, her life partner, her friend, her other half. How could she leave him behind?
And how would he endure it? Her quadriplegia had worn him down; her fight with constant pain had almost pushed his head underwater. What would cancer do? And if God took her, how would he handle being alone?
A few weeks ago, she would have been very afraid that the cancer diagnosis and the prospect of a mastectomy would have pushed him over the edge, that it would have been a bridge too far. But — how strange it was! — that wasn’t what happened at all.
Something different was going on with Ken. It was like being outside at a moment when the clouds shifted and the light changed. Everything was essentially the same, and yet — the scene took on a different hue. A subtle shift of colors. A sudden softening of shadows. Something was up with her husband!
She had noticed it at the first mammogram. He had been with her through so much over the years, but somehow — how could she put it into words? — he was really with her in that room. With her in a new way. Totally there. Totally tuned in. Totally by her side. Not just physically there, but THERE there. Rather than pushing away, he was pressing in, and more attentive than he had been in many years. Even on — no, especially on — the weekends.
And even at that strange time in that strange place, it had felt … comforting. Something deep within her had warmed to that, and wanted it to go on.
And it did go on!
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