A Wheelchair and the Love of Jesus Changes Everything

Hi, I’m Evalerie, and I serve as Vice President of Talent Management at Joni and Friends. I’d love to share with you about how God changed my life—and that of a girl named Prences—when he wove our stories together earlier this year on a Wheels for the World™ outreach in the Philippines.

“The Lord put it on my heart: ‘I have to go!’”

I was born in the Philippines. My family moved to the U.S. when I was four years old, and I never had the chance to go back until I was an adult. Thirteen years ago, before I started at Joni and Friends, my husband and I took our four kids to the Philippines. Showing my family the place I grew up was special and meaningful, but I still felt like God had more for me to do there. After the trip I prayed about going back, and God put it on my heart to return to the Philippines to serve—to share his Gospel with the people there.

When I started at Joni and Friends, we didn’t have an outreach to the Philippines. So you can imagine my excitement when the ministry announced that we would extend our reach to the Philippines. And when the opportunity came for me to join a Wheels for the World Philippines outreach, I knew I had to go.

“There was this one…”

I felt an immediate connection with the people in the Philippines when I went to serve. It was the Lord’s doing. People opened up to me easily—I would try to speak Tagalog with them, and they would share their lives. I bonded with so many families. But among all the people I met, there was this one who stood out…

Prences is seventeen years old but the size of a toddler, and very thin. Her parents don’t know her diagnosis, but our therapists believe she may have cerebral palsy and scoliosis, among other disabilities.

I have never seen someone whose body was contorted in every which way like hers. My heart just broke. I wondered if she could even be placed in a wheelchair.

So many questions raced through my mind, and I put them into prayers for Prences and her family: ‘Lord, work in their hearts,’ I prayed.

“Sing to her.”

Still working with other families, I kept looking over at Prences, hearing her whimper and cry as the therapist and seating mechanic tried to ease her stiff joints enough to fit her properly in a chair. My friend David called me over. “Sing to her, Evalerie,” he said.

So I started to sing, “Jesus loves you,” and put my hand gently on her face. Slowly her whimpers calmed, and finally stopped.

“And then she looked at me.”

Until that moment, Prences had been looking every which way, unfocused. And then she looked at me. In that instant I caught a glimpse of her from a new perspective—through God’s eyes—gazing at his beloved daughter. And he gave me another song to sing… “You are so beautiful to me.”

Suddenly I was overwhelmed by God’s love for Prences—how he knows her by name, as his beautiful child. Then I looked up at her parents, watching their daughter being cared for and seen—now sitting up calmly in her wheelchair. That was the first time I saw a smile on her mom’s face.

The whole trip to the Philippines was amazing. But that experience, feeling the love Jesus has for Prences and her family—it was so powerful for me.

That wheelchair not only changed all of their lives… it helped them—and me—to experience what it says in Ephesians 3:17–18: “…how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ.”