Joni Eareckson Tada's Songs of Suffering: 25 Hymns and Devotions for Weary Souls – Transcript

00:14suffering is not much good in it but it will teach you who you are it's a textbook that will show you the stuff of which you are made and sometimes it's not very pretty suffering will squeeze that out of you you know you we say we know christ well okay the next time you suffer and suffer hard find out find out what comes out of your

00:42mouth that'll show how much you know jesus and so in that sense it's it's it's it's good in a strange way i was the last of four girls my daddy wanted a boy so i got the name johnny

01:08and the family was very athletic so i was scrambling to keep up with everybody which is probably why i took that reckless dive into shallow water at the age of 17 i was athletic thought i could take an inward pike dive and pull out of it quickly enough but i didn't i took a dive off of a raft into shallow

01:35water and immediately struck bottom that snapped my head back breaking my neck at the fourth cervical level and immediately paralyzing me they took me off to the hospital where i stayed for about a year and a half when the doctors told my family that i would never walk again or have use of my hands they conveyed that to me and it didn't compute i was sitting up in the hospital bed and a friend came to visit with a guitar i

02:02said oh let me play that and he kind of looked at me weirdly but obediently he put the guitar on my chest and i said just put my hand up here and he did and i put my hand on the strings and and i couldn't play them my mind was saying that i could because it was so simple i'd always

02:27played the guitar but but it was a shock to um yeah it suddenly hit me this is different my life's never going to be the same at night alone 2 a.m wanting desperately to cry but there was nobody around to wipe my nose or dry my eyes and i couldn't stand being messy at 2am and not being able to

02:55wipe my nose and so i had to hold a lot in growing up on a farm i loved to ride horses i liked hard work and so when i broke my neck it was like wait a minute i'm the least likely candidate to do life in a wheelchair god you've got the wrong person it's not me i'm your athlete i love to do stuff

03:23and the idea of sitting down for the rest of my life without use of my hands was horrific i was quite bitter and very depressed very despondent because i just could not understand why god would allow something like total paralysis to happen to a young 17 year old girl especially the one who called herself a christian

03:48and i felt that that god had almost deserted me right before my diving accident i knew i was going to go off to college i knew it could be a crossroads spiritually for me i was a christian but temptations were looming and so i prayed jesus do something in my life to really grip it up do anything in my life it's going to

04:14take to draw me close to you i want that i need that and then i broke my neck and i remember thinking in the hospital how could you take my prayer so seriously i mean i i really didn't mean this and i thought god could never be trusted with another prayer again

04:42and yet where else am i going to turn because he's the only one's got the words of life so jesus help me understand help me get it i'm supposed to live like this and what in the world are you doing and what how will i survive

05:13i once wrote a book called a step further and that was back in 1978 and it was my effort to quote make sense of suffering god allows suffering to deepen your faith god allows suffering to refine your character an alphabetical list of one two three four the 16 good biblical reasons as to why god allows suffering and i remember passing it under the nose

05:41of elizabeth elliot you know the manuscript i wanted her endorsement and she said to me i'll never forget it's exact johnny it's true but it's very technical i was crushed but that was in 1978 and now so many years later i understand what she means

06:08because suffering and understanding it is not a matter of good biblical reasons as to what god is doing and why i think the whole purpose behind it is to press us up against the lord jesus and not make suffering so much about us oh how will my faith be refined how will my prayer life be deepened what will i now understand about god's purposes no it's all about

06:36how can i hear his heartbeat how can i resonate and identify with him and in his sufferings so somewhere there there was a thing like a change and i realized it's not about me my paralysis is about knowing jesus better and that i think is the summation of it all just to know him better

07:10more than half a century of living in a wheelchair is a quadriplegic a couple of battles with stage three cancer pulmonary hypertension i'm not even sure what that is but it's my daily struggle with chronic pain that makes life hard in fact it makes my quadriplegia feel like a walk in the park i can do quadriplegia but i it's hard to do pain

07:41one of my favorite hymns prone to wander lord i feel it prone to leave the god i love here's my heart and i do that a lot i say to jesus here's my heart and i manage my heart i when i say here's my heart to jesus i i said heart you are not going to go down that grim

08:08dark road to depression you have been there one too many times and it's going to rip your your blue part you don't want that and so i i've got to constantly be driving it like a sheepdog snapping at its heels down the road to calvary every morning just to find jesus in the midst of this discouragement or depression i've got to tell my heart constantly go find jesus he's your hope he's the only one he'll satisfy

08:36and i'm i'm grateful then that for that hymn when i've got to manage my heart i turn to hymns that are sturdy enough to barge into my soul shake it awake and say get back to jesus where you belong

09:05the timeless hymns are just a repository of wealthy doctrine and they've helped me so much when i have been devastated by pain sometimes i cannot put two words together in prayer the the pain is so bad but when you've memorized hymns

09:27they're just there at night when i can't sleep at 2am 4am whatever i don't get anxious about it i used to but i don't i just breathe deeply and i talk to my

09:55pain you're not going to have control of me because second corinthians chapter 4 verse 8 says that though i am pressed in on all sides i'm not crushed so pain you're not going to crush me i'm going to find jesus in you and then i start singing to him jesus i am resting resting in the joy of what thou art i am finding out the greatness

10:21of thy loving heart of thy wounded heart of thy suffering heart of thy painful heart and i wish i could describe to you the sweetness and the intimacy that i find with my savior so god bless the pain what a harsh severe mercy

10:47but what a sweet one because it has helped me just love him i remember i was a little girl and seeing these old women in church who

11:13would talk about how sweet the savior was and i think okay i guess old people talk that way but of all the things i've learned about him he is so sweet that he's so lovely and he is so

11:40worth knowing he's ecstasy beyond compared and i would much rather be in this wheelchair knowing him like that than to be on my feet without him honestly i would if i would i'd like to quote just a short poem that has mentioned please do that's great um when i was in the hospital a friend of mine shared with me a particular hymn

12:07and it's you know abide with me fast falls the evening tide when darkness deepens lord with me abide when other helpers fail and comforts flee help of the helpless or abide with me i think that kind of sums it up too just about how i feel that that i can abide in the lord's grace even in this wheelchair and that constantly amazes me that my goodness i i feel his sustaining power every day

12:35and it and it just underscores to me that god can empower anyone to rise above their circumstances

13:14you