How God Redeemed My Life in the Face of Anguish
When I started to seriously consider the lordship of Christ in my life, I wanted to get rid of everything that reminded me of my “bad old days.” I tossed music albums, love letters, trashy magazines, and the empty daydreams they fostered. I didn’t want to be the one Jesus spoke about in Luke 9:62:
“No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God.”
Luke 9:62
I did not want to look back on my old life. I wanted absolutely nothing to disqualify me from serving in the kingdom of God.
Of the many things I dumped in the trash can, I chose to include a drawing from my time in the hospital. Nearly a year into a lifetime of quadriplegia had me struggling through a season of deep depression. And so, my occupational therapist—knowing that I had artistic talent—challenged me to draw.
“Draw whatever is going on inside you,” she said.
My OT pushed my wheelchair up to a table easel, gave me a charcoal pencil, and as I reached for the sketchpad… all my anguish poured out.
As I sketched, a self-portrait took shape. It wasn’t the free-spirited, energetic Joni that had been. No, I drew my face hemmed in by the Stryker frame, the flat metal frame I had been lying on for nearly a year. The padding to support my head while I faced downward formed stark lines across my forehead and chin, and my eyes peered out, filled with desolation.
“God, I can’t do this!” I cried out as I drew. “You’ve got the wrong person! This can’t be my life.”
This portrait of my depression reminded me of so many questions I had hurled at God. My “why?” was more like shaking my fist at heaven rather than a sincere desire to hear answers. Long after I had completed this sullen portrait and began to earnestly seek God’s purposes for my broken neck, I could barely look at the sketch. Its drooping lines dragged me back to that awful place, and I couldn’t bear it. My charcoal drawing had to go.
I thought little more of it until the making of the Joni movie. While re-enacting the months I spent in the hospital, I was asked to recreate my self-portrait. As my sorrowful eyes took shape once again in front of me, I realized that, in a way, my Face of Anguish was the portrait of anyone who struggles through depression and despair.
Though I trashed the first drawing, eager to rise above my despair, this recreated piece is perhaps the most precious, meaningful, and treasured work of art I possess. Instead of pulling me back to the past, it reminds me of how the grace of God met me there and changed me.
God stepped into my life at my lowest, when I could not see past an existence of paralysis strapped to a Stryker frame. He stood by me in my despondency and drew my gaze toward him.
God redeemed my life from that place of anguish.
More than that, he used the season of my depression to make me fit for the kingdom work he had prepared me to do.
Friend, whatever distress you may feel about your life right now or in your past, God’s grace can, and will, meet you there. Let your discouraging circumstances be that glorious place of encountering the living God—and friend, you will never be the same.
-Joni Eareckson Tada
From the Heart of the Founder
Joni Eareckson Tada reflects on how a diving accident, once seen as the ruin of her life, became the catalyst for God’s transformative purpose.
