For forty-five years, Joni Eareckson Tada’s memoir of the years after the diving accident that left her paraplegic has remained in print and read by millions. Reading the latest anniversary edition, I wondered if Joni’s thoughts on her injury had changed since they were first put into print. A half-century of perspective will certainly change someone. I also wanted to talk with her about disability advocacy and what churches can do to be inclusive, empowering, and welcoming. I’m grateful for the opportunity to have done just that, and to be able to share it all with you. Watch the video version for an exclusive peek at an original piece of art painted by Joni!

The Conversation | Joni Eareckson Tada
This interview transcript has been lightly edited for conciseness and clarity. A full transcript of the interview is available here.
 Josh Olds: You speak very openly about the struggle that it was that, you’ve kind of gotten to a point where you talk about suffering and God’s glory, but those early days, those early days were really hard for you. And how important was it for you that people understood the realities of your struggle?
Joni Eareckson Tada: Well, let me correct something that you just said. It’s still hard. It is still very hard. In fact, the older I get, it gets harder. I deal with chronic pain. And so, I look back on that book, Josh, and I’m just so grateful that the insights I shared from the Word of God still apply. I still wake up in the morning, even after so many decades of paralysis. I still wake up in the morning, saying, “Jesus, I need you desperately. I cannot do quadriplegia today. I am so tired of the pain and the challenges, but I can do all things through you, Jesus, if you would but strengthen me.” Now that’s a principle that everybody can grasp.
And that’s why I felt it would be important too, you know, when I wrote the book Joni, with my co-author Joe Messer, I thought it would be very important to be as honest and visceral and gutsy and open and transparent as I possibly could be. Because not everybody’s a quadriplegic, and I knew that the average reader probably wouldn’t even have a disability, but handicaps come at us in all shapes and sizes. And so I just wanted to focus on the Word of God in that book, so that the reader dealing with whatever his challenge might be, would grasp those biblical anchors and just run with them. And that’s why I’m, I think it might still be, you know, it still might be a book that people want to read. Because those biblical insights, indeed, are timeless. Those anchors are applicable, even to me, the author, so many decades later, I’m still waking up in the morning needing Christ desperately. And shouldn’t we all be in that position? Right? Just needing Jesus?
Josh Olds: Obviously, you you’ve lived with this for decades. What…have you ever imagined or thought about how your life would be different if your injury had not happened?
Joni Eareckson Tada: I might be on my second divorce. I don’t know what I’d be doing. I certainly wouldn’t be sitting here, Josh, talking to you about biblical anchors and the promises of God and the hope in His Word. I really don’t think I would be. I mean, I broke my neck in 1967. That was the year, it was the summer I was heading off to college. I am shamed to admit this, but I was sleeping with my boyfriend in high school. I was living a life of sexual impurity and immorality, and I knew it was going to get worse, and in college wasn’t going to get better. And I remember praying a prayer and I think it was like April or May of 1967, I’d come home from a sordid date with my boyfriend, and I felt so guilty.