For those of us who do not experience a miracle of physical healing in our present earthly lives, can we hang on? Can we hold onto hope? And more than just holding on, can we learn what we should learn during our “period of captivity”? (That’s what it feels like on days when my pain nearly drives me crazy.)
Do I pray for miraculous healing for my chronic pain? You bet I do.
Am I expecting it? If God wills, yes.
“Whatever You want, Lord,” I pray. “If it would give You more glory and advance Your gospel more quickly, I’m all for it!” Always and always I want to be in submission to the Father and obedient to the Word of Jesus—knowing full well that if I had everything else in life and lacked that, I would have nothing at all.
Because isn’t that the bottom line? That Jesus gets the glory, whether I jump out of my wheelchair pain free and tell people that my healing is genuine evidence of God’s awesome power … or whether I continue smiling in my chair, not in spite of my pain but because of it, knowing I’ve got lessons to learn, a character to be honed, other wounded people to identify with, a hurting world to reach with the gospel, and a suffering Savior with whom I can enjoy greater intimacy. And every bit of it genuine evidence of God’s love and grace.
The book you hold in your hands is a chronicle of what I am going through right now. For the past five years I’ve been in the wrestling ring with an enemy that seems to grow larger, more fiendish and hatefully aggressive, with each passing month. I am speaking of my ongoing battle with pain—sometimes slow and grinding, sometimes white-hot and seemingly unbearable. In fact, as I write these words, I am seeing yet another specialist to see if there is anything—anything at all—that can be done for a simmering agony I would gladly and with great joy and gratitude leave behind.
I wanted to weave that aspect of my life into these pages as well. Not for sensational purposes, but simply because that is where I am and who I am. As you will see, writing a book about God’s healing from a platform of intense suffering gives an urgency to the subject that keeps it from becoming detached or academic.
Healing—or even a brief respite from the pain war—is certainly uppermost in my mind these days.
No … let me amend that. Bringing honor to the name of my Savior and King is uppermost, whether He chooses to give me relief now or just around the corner in His Father’s house. Either way, He will help me and save me and, yes, crown me with joy.
Just as He always has.
One
Report from the Front Lines
If God sends us on strong paths, we are provided strong shoes.
—Corrie ten Boom
This is no time to write a book.
But I have to try.
It won’t be easy. It may not be wise. Nevertheless, if you are reading these words, it has been accomplished, and the book has been published. God be thanked!
So mark it here. I am taking on a task that in-the-know book writers wouldn’t attempt, and setting myself to complete an assignment that military historians would never dream of undertaking. I am writing in the midst of my experience, in the violence of a firefight, in the crush of circumstances, and in the vice grip of unrelenting pain. I am recording my combat-zone observations before the smoke has cleared, before the shells have stopped falling, before the guns have gone silent, before the long grass and wildflowers have grown over the scars of war.
And I am writing with great urgency. My life is changing, and I want to speak to these issues of suffering in a believer’s life—and yes, to God’s undeniable healing power—while I still can. Incessant pain, as those who have lived in its grip can attest, makes it very difficult to think, work, relate, plan, write, and—as I recently discovered—take on a public-speaking opportunity.
Not long ago I was invited to speak to a class at Biola University here in Los Angeles, California. I’d been asked to address Dr. Kathy McReynolds’s class on “A Theology of Suffering and Disability,” a course designed by Biola and our Christian Institute on Disability here at the Joni and Friends International Disability Center. Dr. McReynolds had asked me to come and lecture her sixty-five students on how God redeems suffering. And some of those students, she had told me, had deeper questions than that.
The class met in one of those classrooms in the older part of campus that has no windows—and precious little ventilation. The professor had placed a fan near one of the doors, which I appreciated. Still, without windows and on a warm day in Southern California, the room immediately seemed hot and close.
Before I could even be introduced, I felt those familiar sensations of the walls closing in on me.
Claustrophobia, my old nemesis.
It was the same feeling that comes when I wake up at 2 a.m., after the pain medication has worn off and Ken is sleeping soundly. In those dark, middle-of-the-night moments, I’m not physically able to free myself from a too-hot blanket, and the stiffness of lying in one position for so many hours overtakes me with a rush of pain that dares me to try to fall asleep again.
Dr. McReynolds introduced me to the class, and I looked across the room as I began. Some young, fresh-faced juniors leaned forward on their elbows, anticipating, I gathered, something bright and inspirational. Others slouched, fiddling with their pencils. Those were probably the ones with the “deeper questions.” Well, welcome to the club.
I began where I have begun a thousand times before: with my own testimony. The hot summer morning at Chesapeake Bay. The raft, the dive, the impact, the injury, the Stryker frame in a Baltimore hospital … the long years of treatment and therapy, and the beginnings of an unimaginable ministry. From there I bridged into the whole question of God’s will. How could God allow all this to happen in my life? Although I try to make it fresh, I have to admit there are times when it all sounds a little too rote, a little too pat in my own ears.
But not this time.
Fresh Urgency
At this stage of my life the question bears down on me with fresh urgency, just as it did in that very moment in the classroom. Although I’d tried hard to get my corset right before the class, and although I’d been lifted up, carefully positioned, and repositioned repeatedly that day, I was hurting.
I mean really hurting.
Fifteen minutes into my talk I found myself squirming in my wheelchair and biting my lip, struggling to express even familiar thoughts and ideas. And the room was so warm. It felt like an extra effort just getting my breath.
I somehow muddled through my allotted forty-five minutes. But it had felt like a muddle. Had the students gained anything from it? Their faces told me at least some had been moved—perhaps even deeply. Certainly no one was slouching or doodling now. Had God done something mysterious with my labored presentation—something beyond what I could have reasonably expected? (How many times He has done that before!)
After a short break it was time for the question-and-answer segment. Most of the questions were pretty predictable, but for whatever reason, one of those common, expected questions suddenly pierced deeply, touching some nerve I hadn’t even realized was raw.
“You mentioned that you’re going through a season of pain,” the student began. “I would think it would be awfully distracting from your main mission. Why do you think God allowed this?”
Why, indeed.
Why has God allowed this? I’m almost sixty years old! Why such agony and distraction at this point in my journey, after all these years of enduring, persevering, and seeking to serve Him?
The simple question, like driftwood hidden in heavy surf, came at me in a wave of fresh pain. It’s not like I hadn’t dealt with that issue a million times. I’ve handled that “why does God allow this” query on countless occasions in numberless settings in multiple languages throughout the course of my paralyzed life, but … for some reason, I found it terribly difficult to answer in that
moment. Was it because I was tired? Lack of sleep will do that to you. Was it because the room was stuffy and the fan wasn’t working? Was it because I’d stopped quietly pleading with God for His mercy?
My throat thickened and my eyes welled with tears. I started to answer. I had the words on my tongue. But I had to stop. I took short breaths to gain composure, but my nose began to run and tears escaped my lower lids.
Yeah, I’d lost it, and the students all knew it.
Now what?
I didn’t want to make a scene. Didn’t want the whole thing to look contrived. But what could I do but plow ahead, nearly blubbering my response? “I—I have thought about that question many times … and … I’ve never said this in public, but … lately I have wondered.… Well, it’s like this. For decades I haven’t suffered. Not really. Yes, I’m a quadriplegic and that’s hard, but it’s mostly behind me. I’m used to it. I’ve almost forgotten what having hands that work feels like. But with this pain, it’s—it’s as though God is reintroducing me to suffering, like … I’m brand-new to it and have never experienced it before.
“Why? I don’t know. Maybe—maybe He has allowed this so that what you’ve just heard—the last forty-five minutes—wouldn’t come off as something trite, something rehearsed, or sound like a platitude. The Bible says, ‘Not many of you should be teachers.’ And perhaps this is why.”
The classroom fell dead silent. Rising quietly from his perch on the front row, my wonderful Ken came up with a Kleenex—and I didn’t even care that the students were watching me blow my runny nose. Anyway, I doubt that they minded.
You can’t teach about suffering from a textbook. You can place yourself in front of a class, lecture, and even do a snappy PowerPoint, but how do you communicate truth so that words become a branding iron on a heart of soft wax? How else do you treat the subject of suffering? Sharing about suffering is like giving a blood transfusion … infusing powerful, life-transforming truths into the spiritual veins of another. And you can’t do that with words only. Or, you shouldn’t. How can you learn about suffering except by feeling the pain yourself? But mercifully, none of those sixty-five students had to break their necks that day or endure mind-bending pain. They just had to have faith that the tears were real … which proved that the Man of Sorrows really can redeem suffering.
For me and for them.
The Fight of My Life
So here I am gathering these thoughts and writing them down, working with an editor and starting a book when some would say that the timing is all wrong. “Wait awhile, Joni,” they say. “Get some perspective. Conserve your energy. Concentrate on getting better.”
Famous military leaders who write their memoirs are usually retired, but I’m still in the battle. Storied generals like Grant, Lee, Pershing, Eisenhower, Montgomery, and Churchill wrote after years of reflection. (I have a mental picture of a wicker rocking chair on an old-style front porch, with a light spring breeze carrying the scent of lilacs and teasing the corners of a writing tablet.) But I’m penning these words in the midst of hostilities, while the dust and smoke of war still drift over the battlefield.
In fact, I find myself in the fight of my life. I’m in the thick of it, as they say, and honestly have no idea how long this struggle will continue or how and when it will be resolved.
As I said, it’s an unlikely time to write a book on healing.
To this very moment my great adversary is not the garden variety of aches and hurts associated with quadriplegia. No, this is something new and malevolent that has intruded into my life. It manifested first as a driving lance of pain in my neck. And just as I began to “reconcile myself” to that field of battle, a new, even fiercer attack broke out on a new front—my lower back. The persistent attacks of physical agony I have experienced over the last two years are beyond anything I could have imagined.
Words truly fail me.
After keeping me in the hospital for days and putting me through what seemed like every test known to man, doctors have at last discovered the culprit—or one of the culprits. It is a fracture in my sacrum—that large, triangular bone at the base of the spine. No wonder I’ve been in such a state! No wonder those fiery fingers radiate across my abdomen. The fact is, every moment I’ve been sitting up, I’ve actually been sitting on the injury itself.
Since remaining upright in my wheelchair for any length of time hasn’t been possible, I’ve been working from a little bed in my office. Some days I do attempt to sit up for as long I am able, trying to complete as much work as I possibly can before pain drives me back to bed.
As you might imagine, it has complicated everything I do by a factor of ten. Here’s one small example.
Not long ago I was sitting in my studio, attempting to record my Joni and Friends weekly radio program, an activity I have enjoyed for decades. On this occasion, however, I found myself with a very troubling choice: I could cinch my corset extra tight, enabling me to breathe properly in order to talk, but also greatly increasing my pain. Or, I could loosen the corset, lessening the pain, but making it a struggle to record. So I did both. It was read a page or two, stop, tighten the corset, then read again, then loosen it again. I got it done, but it all seemed so very slow and took so long.
The truth is, over this past year I’ve endured some of the most difficult days and weeks of my life—rivaling those early days in the Baltimore hospital after my injury.
An Honest Fear
Is my life beginning to unravel? Have I reached a limit in what I can endure? Have my friends and coworkers and—God forbid—my husband reached a limit in what they can endure for my sake? How much longer can I—can they—go on like this? These are the questions that plague me.
Finally, after all these years, I’m honestly beginning to wear people out. These are the people—around eight or so—who graciously offer to get me up in the morning—or in the case of Judy and my husband, Ken, help me through the night. It used to be that only my husband helped me turn in bed in the evening, and often, I didn’t need his assistance through the night. He would put me up on my side, tuck my pillows, and then I’d comfortably sleep straight through until morning.
That doesn’t work anymore.
Neither do muscle relaxers. Or Advil PM. Or even Vicodin. Or (and I’m sorry to say this) even stronger drugs than that.
I despise taking medication. Born of my mother and father’s sturdy stock, I’m a little bit of German and a wee bit Scotch-Irish, with some Swedish thrown in for good measure. It’s a solid constitution, my family line. For all my years (and I learned this from my parents), I took some pride in the fact that I could push through pain relying on only an aspirin or two. That’s just the way I was made; that’s the way I handled pain.
The medications don’t work very long, anyway—and the side effects can sometimes be worse than the original affliction. It’s a little like those TV commercials that promise your skin will be silky smooth with this particular medicine—but take it only upon the risk of kidney disease, liver failure, dry mouth, nausea, and thoughts of suicide! Who wants nice skin after that?!
Seriously, nothing seems to work. Almost like clockwork, I wake up at 2 a.m. with searing pain in my lower back—particularly in the quadratus lumborum and the iliopsoas. (I know my muscle groups.) For the layman, it translates into the left lower back above my hip along with the left abdomen and inside of my thigh. It probably doesn’t mean much to you, but those parts of my body—paralyzed as I am with no feeling in the rest of my limbs—in the wee small hours of the morning come alive with throbbing pain.
Sometimes I can get back to sleep. Most times I bite my lip until my whimpering can be heard by Ken who, unfortunately, now must sleep in a bedroom adjacent to the one we’ve shared for years. That’s when he shuffles in, bleary-eyed and trying hard to not awaken himself too much so he can get back to sleep. Then on automatic pilot, he turns me.
It used to be on my other side, but I can’t tolerate that anymore. Now I go on my back for a couple hours. Then it’s up again at 4 a.m., and hopefully that’ll keep me until my girlfriends arrive at 7:30 a.m.
It never used to be this way. Honestly.
I never used to keep that kind of sleep schedule. I never used to whine. I never used to wake up wondering if I’d be able to get out of bed. Most of all, I never remember being this anxious or fearful. Some of it is understandable, but I suspect most of it is a side effect of the medications.
This is why I’m afraid I’m wearing out my friends. And my husband. Now when my girlfriends begin my exercise routine in the morning it involves at least an extra hour of stretching and pulling my muscles. “Oh, could you please pull on my back muscle? Like, angle your hand toward the headboard and … that’s it…. Kind of rake-up my back with your fingers…. Gee, I can’t quite feel that…. Can you dig in harder?”
They give me odd looks now. It used to be fun getting me up. We would sing. We would say to each other, “We get to go work for Jesus today!” But these days, we all just do the best we can.
But one thing is better.
We are all much more dependent on God for help.
And for sanity itself.
Because I have never been more aware that I am a target of the Devil and his hordes.
A Target
The adversary knows very well what my example of trust and confidence in God has meant to Christians throughout the years, from the time I published my first book, Joni, back in 1976 through the present. Has Satan read my books? I seriously doubt it—there’s way too much Jesus in those pages for his liking. Nevertheless, he knows my love for the Savior and hates me for it.
My enemy has most probably assigned some captain in his lowerarchy of hell to harass me. My wicked adversary knows I have at least become accustomed to quadriplegia. He recognizes that total and permanent paralysis is no longer the struggle it used to be for me. He is aware that my profound disability has helped me develop the prized characteristic of needing God desperately when I wake up in the morning.
A Place of Healing Page 2