Nick>> Joni, for the people who don't know your story,
tell us about how God got your attention and how He rescued your
soul and how the joy has become in the Lord, center point, from teenager onward.
Joni>> Okay, well I'll be quite honest, quite frank, quite blunt. When I was a teenager,
oh sure, I had accepted Jesus as my Savior, but I kind of tucked Him in the back of
my Levi jeans pocket and really did not follow Him day by day as I should have.
I thought that coming to Christ would give me a new boyfriend. I would lose weight. I would
get good grades at school. I'd be put on an academic recommendation to my
favorite college. I just thought every, all the chips, were going to line up for me, and so it was
all about me, and even when I finally did get that boyfriend, that was not the best thing because I
would do one thing with my boyfriend on a Friday night, but then I get up on Sunday morning, go to
church and feel full of guilt, confessing my sins, promising God, “Oh, I won't do that again, Lord!”
But then the following week it would just be a cycle of sin, and
I enslaved myself. I entrapped myself in a world of sin out of which I could not
break free, and so finally somewhere before high school graduation, I remember praying,
"Jesus, I'm not living as I should. I'm being a hypocrite. I'm doing one thing with a boyfriend and yet
confessing another thing around my Christian friends. I can't stand to live like this. I
don't want to shame you further when I go off to college. Do something in my life that's going to
really jerk it right side up because I I can't do it. I'm just powerless to do anything, God.”
I prayed that prayer and about two weeks after high school graduation back in 1967,
I went for a swim on the Chesapeake Bay with my sister, dove into some shallow water, hit my head
on a sandy bottom. It cracked my neck back, and I could feel a crunch. My spinal cord severed,
and I was floating face down in the water. My sister thankfully saw that I had not uprighted
myself. She quick came, rescued me. I'm spitting, sputtering, gasping for breath, almost drowning,
and when I saw my arm slung over my sister's shoulder, and yet I couldn't feel it,
I knew something awful had happened.
Well, the doctors told me I'd broken my neck. I'll never use my hands or my legs again,
and Nick, I remember thinking in the hospital, paralyzed, lying there,
knowing that I would have to sit down for the rest of my life in a wheelchair, I remember thinking,
“God is this your idea of an answer to prayer?—to be drawn closer to You?"
I just couldn't understand it. "What are you doing? How could you have taken me so seriously?”
And I think that's when the depression began to grip me and doubts about God's goodness and
how He could be trusted with prayer. So many questions in my heart –but thankfully, Nick,
there were Christian friends who came around me, supported me, came to the hospital with
their guitars, and CDs and singing songs and flipping through magazines with me and keeping
me connected with reality and loving me, bringing in sugar cookies, peanut butter cookies. I don't
know. They just loved me, and because they loved me, they kind of won the right to be
heard, you know, so when they finally opened up their Bibles this time, I really listened.
I listened to what God might have to say to me, and the first thing I heard Him say was,
Joni, Psalm 62:8, “Trust in the Lord at all times.”
“God, You mean this includes those ALL times?”
“Yes, Joni, trust Me!” and Nick, I had nowhere else to go. I was backed up against a corner.
I didn't want to feel sorry for myself for the rest of my life, and so I said, “God,
I have nowhere else to go. You're the One who's got the words of life. Show me what...
How am I supposed to live if I can't die. Show me how to live."
And I don't know for the past 55-56 years in this wheelchair, He's been showing me how to live,
and I'm finding new things about Him every day that are worth trusting.