A Lifetime of Wisdom: Embracing the Way God Heals You

The author, Joni Eareckson Tada, was only seventeen when she became paralyzed after a diving accident. She says God asked her for everything she had....health, hopes, independence, dreams, freedom, and mobility. At first she was angry... More than forty years later, thru trials, disappointments, challenges, and fear, this amazing woman has produced her best book yet. A lifetime in a wheelchair has enabled her to share with us, some of the wisdom she has acquired about her faith in God. Along with her autobiography, "The God I Love", Joni, an accomplished artist, musician, author of many inspirational books, is also an international disability advocate. She once told God "I can't live like this. If You won't let me die, then show me how to live". He did. She listened. The world loves this beautiful woman. Reader, if you need more proof that our creator God indeed exists, check out this book and the resource pages Joni provides in back of the book that will inspire you to rise above your present circumstances. Joni's lifetime of wisdom "lifts us higher" and she has learned how to do it as a quadriplegic. You cannot help but love her and all those who have assisted her over the decades, including her devoted husband.

We are reading this book in our book club and it is excellent. Joni weaves her story with Biblical principles in such an interesting way. After spending more than 40 years in a wheelchair, she definitely has some wisdom to share. What's great is that she doesn't just "preach" it to you. She shares it in a new way that will defnitely make you think. I have recommended this book to several friends.

I haven't read a Joni book in a long time but found this one while browsing through the library. I'm so glad I did! What makes this book so good is that Joni goes back to how she thought about things when she was a teen and now shares 40 years later what she has learned since. As always, the writing in Joni's books is superb. This book is hard to put down. It gave me sort of a spiritual bath, which I think we all need from time to time to reflect on the really important things in life. Bless you, Joni! I highly recommend you read this book!

This book contains wisdom that only years and years of suffering with Christ can bring. Suffering with Christ can bring one into pure joy and happiness beyond the physical realm in order to endure the hardship life can bring. Christ says that He will never give us more then we can handle. Joni shows us how to handle life in the good and bad times! Great Read!! Endearing!!

Though Joni Eareckson Tada does not divulge her exact age in these pages, she's clearly pushing 60. It's hard for some of us to imagine this, because we were so influenced by the images of her first book, JONI, in which she was such a young woman, struggling to accept the realities of her physically constricted life: a quadriplegic confined to a bed or wheelchair as a result of a diving accident. But her mature age is the hook that makes this current book work. Looking back, over more than 40 years of confinement, often with physical pain, she speaks the wisdom of age and faith to emotions, feelings and questions that virtually defined her in her youth. Each chapter starts with a brief scene from Tada's past, written in the present tense. You are there with her --- in a Baltimore hospital feeling as if someone is suffocating her in the middle of the night; a month later, after a surgery, alone, afraid, despairing; on another day when a friend visits and reads a requested Bible passage; a decade later, when she's speaking to a captive audience, prisoners at a correctional facility in Northern Virginia. "I told them how weak-kneed I sometimes got when I thought about living twenty or even thirty more years in a wheelchair." Tada then addresses the scene from a contemporary vantage point. In the chapter titled "Sufficient Grace" that starts in a prison setting, she reflects: "I'll admit it, the long years haven't made paralysis any easier." Yet the book is bigger than Tada's personal story. As founder of Joni and Friends, "an organization accelerating Christian outreach in the disability community," she draws vignettes of hope from a wide network of people needing and finding help and hope in difficult situations. And she presents a lot of scriptural teaching that broadens the text out to appeal to any reader who has faced disappointment, depression, discouragement, disillusionment --- and who hasn't? Chapters specifically deal with the place of anger, feelings of "suffocation," loneliness, and discontentment, the weight --- or waiting --- of time, the use of prayer, the place of hope, the promise of heaven... I have not read many of Tada's intervening books --- including three volumes of 366 daily readings and a work titled HEAVEN: YOUR REAL HOME --- so I cannot judge whether A LIFETIME OF WISDOM presents significantly new material. Having said that, I found this book refreshing. Tada has suffered too much to give easy answers, and yet she has written faith and hope on every page. And at the end, appendices provide 20 pages of Scripture passages (NIV) dealing with "God's Control over Human Suffering" and "God's Purpose in Our Sufferings" --- excellent resources for personal insight or ministry. --- Reviewed by Evelyn Bence