A Lifetime of Wisdom: Embracing the Way God Heals You

by Joni Eareckson Tada Narrated by Joni Eareckson Tada

Overview

It's not what I lost. It's what I've found. I was only seventeen, just a girl, when God asked me for everything I had . . .*my health, my hopes, my independence, my dreams, my freedom, and my mobility. He took it all.

I was so angry with Him that I tried to push Him away. God relentlessly held me more closely. Looking back, forty years later, I understand that God has changed and healed me--my heart and my mind--in the most unexpected ways, giving me rubies of His wisdom about an unbending faith and an experience of His mercy I can now tell you about.

Was it a fair exchange, my freedom and no wheelchair for the rubies of wisdom I've been given? Absolutely. In this I have learned at the feet of the Lord Jesus, embracing the way that God heals us, even when we rage at Him in anger, fear, and despair. This book is not about what I lost in that diving accident so long ago. It's about the wisdom He's given me to live life victoriously in the face of disappointments and challenges that we all face.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

When a diving accident in 1967 paralyzed her from the neck down, Tada, then a teenager, questioned God and life itself. Decades later, the author and founder of Joni and Friends, a ministry for the disabled, writes from her wheelchair, "[T]here are more important things in life than walking." In her latest book, Tada jumps back in time to reveal her thoughts as a young quadriplegic, then pleads with her teenage self and the reader to be patient and hopeful. In each chapter, Tada offers a "ruby" of her own hard-won wisdom (e.g., God may not always provide healing; courage in the midst of suffering is a testament to God's love; God gives grace in tough times) and encourages readers to dialogue with God to understand the purpose for hardships. Tada then supports this argument about suffering with Scripture, folding some verses into the chapters and compiling others into three appendices. Those who are ill, struggling or hopeless may be comforted by her testimony and perhaps roused to pray and perform good deeds while awaiting relief in whatever form it may take. (Mar.)

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Library Journal

Tada is well known to many Christian readers; she spectacularly survived a catastrophic diving accident as a teen and went on to paint, write, and launch her own disability center, radio, and television programs. A Lifetime of Wisdom, while certainly a kind of successor to her many popular books, is not a memoir (that's Joni: An Unforgettable Story), but it's her most thoroughgoing take to date on the apparent contradictions between her misfortune and her experience of God's goodness. Messages of false comfort or the assurance of "learning" from disaster are dreadful, especially when delivered by the lucky to the unlucky, but Tada has earned her own right to say, "Thank you, God, for this chair!" While not all readers will find solace in her message that while God controls suffering, suffering is the result of human sin, many will find inspiration in her example. For larger collections.

—Graham Christian

Product Details

BN ID:	2940172635458
Publisher:	Zondervan
Publication date:	02/24/2009
Edition description:	Unabridged

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