"This Is a God I Can Trust"

By Richard N. Ostling

Joni Eareckson's special ministry for the disabled

"What really annoys me is this attitude many people have that your life doesn't count if you don't have a successful job, you're not married or are not physically attractive. There's a cheapness about the value of human life in our society that often shows itself in the way many folks treat handicapped people." These are sharp words, especially coming from a young woman who is a successful commercial artist, a bestselling author and the star of a two-hour, $2 million film version of her life that is being shown all over the U.S.

Joni (pronounced Johnny) Eareckson doesn't surfer the kind of deformity that causes people to point or stare. With her pretty girl-next-door looks, radiant smile, and pert, no-nonsense personality, she is a popular speaker on the Evangelical Protestant celebrity circuit and to nonreligious groups. As she readily admits, she is treated better than most of her fellow disabled Americans. But Joni Eareckson, 31, is totally paralyzed from the neck down.

The summer after she graduated as the "Most Athletic Girl" at a suburban Baltimore high school, she broke her neck in a 1967 diving accident. "Somebody has to bathe me and brush my hair and feed me," she says. "In a sense, success for me is just getting up in the morning, looking at that wheelchair and saying, 'Yeah, it's still here.' "

During her first months in the hospital, she was so helpless that she could not even do what she longed to do--take her own life. She begged a girlfriend to do it for her several times, but the friend refused. Encased in a canvas Stryker frame, Eareckson felt life was meaningless. "All those yardsticks for success that had come to mean so much to me were shattered--being pretty and popular, dating the right guys." The first time she went shopping for clothes, "they just hung on me like a sack." After waves of depression and a phase of reading existentialists and atheists, she gradually came back to a deepened version of the orthodox Christianity in which she had been raised.

During years of tough rehabilitation, she taught herself to draw and paint, holding a pen or a brush between her teeth. Then came the speaking tours and writing, in which she uses her own faith to encourage the despairing and disabled. Last year she organized a national "ministry to those who suffer" called Joni and Friends. Based in Woodland Hills, Calif., it offers both spiritual and practical advice to as many as 2,000 letter writers each week.

During 1981, the United Nations' International Year of Disabled Persons, Eareckson's group will expand seminars to prod Americans into doing more to help this neglected minority. Eareckson consciously puts what she calls "the celebrity thing" to good use in this crusade. "Friends who are disabled look on me as a bridge between themselves and the able-bodied population who, for the most part, wouldn't give them the time of day."

She does not spare fellow Christians:

"I hope God will use the handicapped to go up to some church members, put his finger on their souls and say, 'Look, you proud, pious people, wake up to the needs of people around you.' " She wants to get more of the disabled into the ordinary life of churches and train Christian volunteers as attendants for handicapped neighbors so they are not forced to live in institutions. Eareckson herself was fortunate in having a close-knit, well-off, loving family and a circle of young Evangelical friends. Today she lives with two staff members of her ministry.

In the evangelistic side of her work, Eareckson faces head-on the universal problem that is central to her life and as old as the Book of Job: If a loving God exists, why do the good and the apparently innocent suffer? After she wrote her autobiography Joni (1976), 120,000 letters poured in, mostly with variations on this question. She develops her thoughts in letters and low-key discussions with disabled patients. She also wrote a 1978 book on the issue, called A Step Further (Zondervan; $6.95). It is a plain-spoken version of points often made by Christian writers: for example, "If God's mind was small enough for me to understand, he wouldn't be God." The two books have sold more than 4 million copies. She is effective partly because she has been through so much pain herself.

Eventually she concluded, as most Christians do, that man cannot understand the whys and ways of God regarding pain, but that knowledge of Christ's life and suffering makes pain endurable. "The Bible underscored that I didn't have to hold on to the value that society placed on my life," she says. "Sometimes I can't stand being in a wheelchair, but then God's grace takes over. Even in my handicap, God has a plan and purpose for my life."

At one point she firmly believed that God would heal her miraculously. Today she thinks that "sometimes God may grant healings as a sneak preview of coming attractions, but they aren't guaranteed." She is reassured by belief that she will have a glorified body in heaven. But, she says, "I do not want to just sit around and wish for heaven."

In a pain-filled and skeptical age, Eareckson insists, "God began his earthly existence in a stinky stable. He got angry. He was lonely. He went without a place to call his own, abandoned by his closest friends. He wept real tears. This is a God I can trust. I know my tears count with him." --By Richard N. Ostling. Reported by John Kohan/New York

With reporting by John Kohan

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