You may not have a debilitating disease like dear Melinda, but you do know—all of us do—what it means to be outwardly wasting away day by day. Perhaps you find yourself in your late fifties now, and the changes are encroaching; your limitations—the aches and pains—are catching you by surprise. Well, these are all little wake-up calls, as far as I’m concerned. Little alarm clocks, little waving yellow flags, small signals that remind us that as we are wasting away, we can go to God in our weakness to be renewed and made stronger day by day.
And what does the rest of Melinda’s favorite verse say?
For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal. (2 Cor. 4:17–18)
Feet and toes, hands and fingers, wonderful as they may be, are only temporary appendages to help us get around in this temporary world. But the soul is eternal. That alone is worth all the “light and momentary troubles.”
Just ask Melinda.
Five
How Can I Go on Like This?
We say, then, to anyone who is under trial, give Him time to steep the soul in His eternal truth. Go into the open air, look up into the depths of the sky, or out upon the wideness of the sea, or on the strength of the hills that is His also; or, if bound in the body, go forth in the spirit; spirit is not bound. Give Him time and, as surely as dawn follows night, there will break upon the heart a sense of certainty that cannot be shaken.
—Amy Carmichael
In the dark, in the night, after two in the morning when the pain medication has worn off and sleep has fled, I have faced the stark reality of my life as it is, and asked myself, How can I go on like this?
How can I endure another sleepless night?
How can I go through another morning routine of just trying to get a pain-wracked, uncooperative body ready for the day?
How can I keep my commitments, lead by example, discharge my responsibilities at Joni and Friends, and hold onto my joy when this vise of pain keeps crushing me tighter and tighter?
Such questions will come, of course.
With David, I sometimes sigh, “How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and every day have sorrow in my hear? How long will my enemy triumph over me?”1
It’s all right to ask the questions, and certainly God is neither put off nor offended by our anguished, middle-of-the-night queries. But there is also a time to set the questions aside and think again about answers—good, satisfying answers—He has already given to me through the years.
Answer No. 1: I can go on … because God moves through time with me.
On a hot, sultry July afternoon five years ago, Ken and I observed the thirty-eighth anniversary of a very similar afternoon in 1967 when I broke my neck. In fact, we invited a couple of friends up to our house to celebrate with a dinner of my mother’s famous crab cakes.
Celebrate, you say?
The dictionary defines the word as observing a day or commemorating an event with ceremonies or festivities. Honestly, I can’t think of a better word, given all the good things that have happened as a result of my wheelchair. This particular anniversary marked exactly thirty-eight years since that fateful day of my injury, and we commemorated it with … crabs.
And why not?
We all knew I’d be dead were it not for that feisty Chesapeake Bay blue crab that bit my sister in the water. When that little crustacean snapped at her toe, she whirled around and screamed to me, “Joni, watch out for crabs!” Kathy had no idea I had just dived off the raft. She didn’t know my head had struck a sandbar, cracking my neck—and that I was floating face down, holding my breath, and desperately hoping she’d see me, that she’d come and rescue me!
Thankfully, God got her attention with a crab, and when Kathy couldn’t see me, she became alarmed. That’s when she caught sight of my blonde hair floating on the water’s surface. “Joni!” she yelled. “Joni! Are you okay?!” Little did she know I was within seconds of drowning.
She swam to me in the nick of time. As Kathy hoisted me out of the water, I sputtered and gasped for oxygen. When I saw my arm slung over her shoulder—yet couldn’t feel it—I became nauseous. I knew something terrible had happened.
From that instant, life would never be the same.
And it was so long ago.
Later, after we finished dinner, we took a minute to close out the anniversary dinner with a short reading from John 5.
Now there is in Jerusalem near the Sheep Gate a pool, which in Aramaic is called Bethesda and which is surrounded by five covered colonnades. Here a great number of disabled people used to lie—the blind, the lame, the paralyzed. One who was there had been an invalid for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and learned that he had been in this condition for a long time, he asked him, “Do you want to get well?” (John 5:2–6)
At that point we stopped. “Look at that,” I said, smiling. “Here it is, my thirty-eighth anniversary of quadriplegia, and it actually states that Jesus thought thirty-eight years of paralysis was a long time.”
What an anniversary present! The Lord of the universe who lives outside the confines of time, the Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and the End, who existed before time began—this Jesus feels that living without the use of your legs for thirty-eight years is a long time.
“I’m glad for that,” I said, shaking my head, “because I sure think it’s a long time.”
There have been occasions, I will admit, when I wondered if God empathized—I mean really understood—how I felt, how I have groaned in my paralyzed body and hurt as each year brought more aches and pains. I have wondered because of verses like 1 Peter 5:10, which says, “And the God of all grace … after you have suffered a little while, will himself restore you and make you strong, firm and steadfast.” I like the part about being made strong, but the passage seems to imply that thirty-eight years of suffering is considered only “a little while.” In other words, the Bible makes it sound as if those years of anguish are but a blink of an eye. Doesn’t God know how interminable that much time can feel in a wheelchair? Isn’t He aware of how endless a sleepless night, shot through with searing pain, can seem? What kind of wristwatch is He wearing?!
In fact, He does know. He is aware. And for me, the sweet passage in the gospel of John lays the issue to rest. When Jesus saw the paralyzed man lying on the straw mat by the Pool of Bethesda, we can picture His eyes welling with tears. He saw more than a lonely, disabled man waiting—without any real hope—by the waters rumored to heal. We can imagine Jesus kneeling down to gently touch him. The Savior’s heart went out to that poor soul whose legs were withered and useless. It’s no mistake that Holy Writ says that God thinks thirty-eight years of paralysis is a long haul.
How could that be? First of all, Scripture reminds us that “He Himself knows our frame; He is mindful that we are but dust” (Ps. 103:14 NASB). But beyond the declaration of intimate knowledge regarding that fragile, earthly tent that houses our eternal soul, God went infinitely further to identify with our frailties. As a result, He who was ever beyond time decided before time to enter time, experiencing the passing hours and days and years with those He created. He didn’t have to, but He did. And I believe His Holy Spirit “experiences” life with us moment-by-moment, day by day, turn by turn, mile by mile. He is pleased when we obey Him (even though He already knew we would), and He is truly grieved when we disobey (even though He knew it from the foundation of the earth). He is undoubtedly with us, sharing our joys and sorrows, counting our tears, and whispering reminders of His presence.
“Have you forgotten,” some might reply, “just whom you’re talking about here? Jesus is the Ancient of Days who scattered the galaxies across the heavens and laid the very foundations of the earth. What would thir
ty-eight years be to Him? Less than a heartbeat!”
Yes, in the sense of Christ’s eternity, any amount of earthly time is less than a single tick of the clock. For that matter, the whole history of earth is like a day that has gone by, like a watch in the night (Ps. 90).
In our Lord’s humanity, however, thirty-eight years was more than His whole lifetime. He knows time in a personal, experiential way. As the writer of Hebrews said, “We don’t have a priest who is out of touch with our reality.”2
The God who created time understands time in all its dimensions.
Even before Jesus walked the earth, when the prophet Jeremiah was placed into a lonely dungeon under the house of Jonathan the secretary, we’re told that he remained there “a long time” (Jer. 37:16). How long? A week? A month? Six months? A year? The Bible doesn’t say. But for the distraught prophet, the time in that hateful place must have seemed interminable. When King Zedekiah finally pulled him out for a consultation, the prophet begged, “Do not send me back to the house of Jonathan the secretary, or I will die there.”3
In John 14:9, just before He went to the cross, Jesus said to Philip, “Don’t you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’?”
How long a time? Maybe three to three and a half years? Was that such a lengthy interval? Jesus thought so. It certainly was a long enough period of time for Philip and the other disciples to have understood this most basic, elemental fact about their Lord’s identity. In fact, the word Jesus uses here for “a long time” could be translated “a time as vast as this.”
When He and His disciples walked a hundred miles from Capernaum to Jerusalem, it was a long walk, and it took a long time. And when He was on the cross for six hours, they were six very, very long hours. Six minutes would have been long.
A fistful of years have passed since that crab-cake anniversary dinner. I’ve now crested more than forty years in my wheelchair, and my bones are thinner and more fragile than ever. In the Bible, the number forty usually means a time of testing. Like the forty days it rained on Noah’s ark, or Jesus’ being tested in the wilderness for forty days, or the Israelites’ wandering in the desert for forty years.
What does God think about four decades of paralysis? I got my answer not long ago when I read Joshua 24:7, where the Lord recounts for His children all the trials they endured after they left Egypt. He tenderly reminds them, “Then you lived in the desert for a long time.”
Keep adding the years, and God’s loving-kindness only increases in equal measure. Maybe that’s why Isaiah 43:18–19 says, “Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing!”
I don’t know if I’ll ever see a miraculous healing this side of my gravestone. But I do know that usually after forty years of testing, after the forty-year trial, there are always moments of victory, power, and jubilation. It’s been ages since a Maryland crab and a broken neck began the unfolding of God’s plan for me and for the ministry I lead to reach other disabled people with God’s loving–kindness. All I know is each ensuing year brings more people with disabilities into the fellowship of sharing in Christ’s sufferings. More people who desire to live to the glory of God. More people whose miracle is a heaven-sent smile, not in spite of the paralysis, but because of it.
I can’t begin to describe to you how important these biblical reassurances about time have been to me in my recent battles with nonstop pain. If I thought that I had a God who set aside the business of eternity from time to time to simply check in on me every few years, I don’t know how I’d survive.
When you find yourself in chronic agony, life gets reduced to hours rather than days—and sometimes minutes and seconds. When I am in physical distress in the night, unable to sleep, unable to move, and unwilling to awaken Ken (again) to turn me, I need to know that God’s concern and care for me is literally breath by breath, heartbeat by heartbeat, moment by moment.
With David, I acknowledge the Lord’s sharp attention to my physical and emotional needs.
I am bowed down and brought very low;
all day long I go about mourning.
My back is filled with searing pain;
there is no health in my body.
I am feeble and utterly crushed;
I groan in anguish of heart.
All my longings lie open before you, O Lord;
my sighing is not hidden from you.
(Ps. 38:6–9)
And also with David, I celebrate the Lord’s constant, attentive presence:
How precious are your thoughts about me, O God!
They cannot be numbered!
I can’t even count them;
they outnumber the grains of sand!
(Ps. 139:17–18 NLT)
There’s a word picture for you. Visualize all of the sand from every dune, every desert, and every beach in the whole world pouring in a golden torrent—on and on and on, heaping up higher and higher—into the clouds! Those are God’s thoughts toward each of His children—outnumbering the grains of sand. The flow of wise, loving, concerned, attentive, watchful, impassioned, infinitely caring thoughts surge on and on, all day, all night, for as long as you live, and forever beyond that. God has infinitely more thoughts about you than there are seconds in your day.
That’s a thought that keeps me going. That’s a truth that enables me to go on when it seems beyond my ability to do so. And here’s another.
Answer No. 2: I can go on … because I know God can use broken instruments to make incomparable music.
Jack Reimer, a syndicated columnist, wrote a story about the great violinist Yitzhak Perlman. Perlman had polio as a child and walks with crutches and braces on both legs. Instead of arranging to be seated on stage at the beginning of his performance, he chooses to walk across the stage methodically and slowly until he reaches his chair. Then he sits down, puts his crutches on the floor, undoes the clasps on his legs, bends down, picks up the violin, nods to the conductor, and proceeds to play. As Reimer describes it, there is a certain majesty in this ritual.
During a 1995 concert, a string on Perlman’s violin suddenly snapped, and everyone in the audience could hear it. The great virtuoso stopped and gazed at the broken string as those in attendance that night wondered what he would do. Perlman closed his eyes, and after a moment of reflection, signaled the conductor to begin again.
Though anyone who knows music understands that it’s impossible to play a symphonic work with just three stings, Perlman was undaunted. Apparently you could see this superb artist actually recomposing the piece in his head as he went along, inventing new fingering positions to coax never-before-heard sounds from his three-string violin.
The sophisticated New York audience watched and listened in awe, knowing they were witnessing a truly groundbreaking performance. When the piece was over, they exploded into appreciative applause. Mr. Perlman smiled, wiped the sweat from his brow, and said in a soft, reverent tone, “You know, sometimes it is the artist’s task to find out how much music you can still make with what you have left.”
That’s another truth that enables me to keep going. Whatever strings are broken in our lives— if we concentrate, if we apply what we know—we can still play beautiful music with what we have left. In fact, it will be music that no one else can play in the same way.
This is a lesson I’ve learned in a wheelchair for so many years—and have had to relearn in these days (and nights) of unremitting pain. Sometimes you have to take what’s left and coax out of life something new and different. Life becomes a recomposition, a series of new chords.
If you’ll accept the analogy, severely disabled people aren’t your regular violins, and God doesn’t perform in our lives in the ordinary way.
People suffering from debilitating i
njuries, terminal illnesses, or chronic physical distress aren’t your standard musical instruments in the orchestra. We can’t do everything able-bodied people can do in their physical strength and mobility and vitality. It takes a special skill to bring music out of a broken instrument, and the one who does deserves recognition and glory.
God is that one.
God is the one who finds incomparable beauty and makes matchless music using the most unexpected and unlikely of instruments. He is the one who told Paul, struggling and agonizing over a nettlesome physical infirmity, “My grace is enough; it’s all you need. My strength comes into its own in your weakness.”4
And in the same way, His melody—His incomparable, heavenly, impossibly beautiful music—somehow comes into its own when it emanates from a broken, battered, but fully yielded human vessel.
It’s music that can only come from particular instruments, broken in particular ways, and yielded with particular humility. I also believe it brings God glory in a way that is completely unique on earth or in the heavens. And that’s a thought that keeps me going, too.
Music played in the dark may have more spiritual power than music performed in the safe and pleasing light of a daylight concert or a well-lighted concert hall.
A few years ago I remember sitting on the stage at a large pastors’ conference in the Philippines. I was so excited to be in such an exotic place, especially during the monsoon season. And sure enough, outside a heavy monsoon rain was falling while the crowd, inside the large hall, was being entertained by a small band of Filipino musicians. Their music was intricate and lively, and the audience was enthralled with their performance.
Suddenly a loud crash of thunder shook the hall, and in the next instant, the entire conference hall was plunged into darkness. The powerful storm had caused the lights to go out. But nobody had bothered to explain that to the blind musical troupe! Unfazed in the pitch-blackness of the hall, the musicians played on without skipping a beat.
A Place of Healing Page 9