"If you want to be first in the Kingdom, if you aspire to be a jewel in Christ’s crown, and oh boy, do I aspire to be that, then do not focus on the hammer in your own life. Look at the sandblasting that’s happening in the lives of others. Let’s help them. Let’s serve them. Let’s look out for their interests.
Girls, it’s why I absolutely love what we do at our ministry, Joni and Friends International Disabilities Center. I mean, sure I may be in a wheelchair, but that does not give me an excuse not to think of others more needy than I am.
God has blessed me so much. He’s given me so much, and Luke chapter 12 says, “From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded, and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked” (verse 48).
God is always asking more of me. Yes, I have a wheelchair, but I’ll tell you there are 18 million other disabled people in the world who don’t have a wheelchair, who don’t have the Word of God.
So I consider it the highest privilege that God asks much of me, that I travel and share the good news of Jesus, to give wheelchairs to needy, disabled people in places like Peru or Poland or China or Cuba.
And yes, my family has been supportive. Yes, I’ve been given much in that regard, as well. Ken is a wonderful husband, but there are families who are splitting apart, and so my husband Ken and I labor alongside of our teams as we held our 20 family retreats this summer.
I wasn’t able to attend them all because of pain, much like having to cancel on being viewed by you in person, but I tell you what, I was praying. I was there in heart and soul, maybe not body, but certainly in intercessions.
If God expects me, a quadriplegic, to be actively engaged in my own sanctification—I mean, if God expects me to give much, what does He expect of you? If you want to increase your capacity for joy, if you want to increase your service and worship in Heaven, if you want to enlarge your eternal estate, then do not focus on the bite of the chisel in your life. Focus on others who need to be quarried out of the dust and dirt of this world. You help them, minister to them, serve them. Look out for their interests."
-Joni Erickson Tada
WOW, I have nothing to add really other than..LORD forgive me for my selfishness, and with my daughter memory verse for the past couple of weeks:
1 Corinthians 13:1-5
If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing.
Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.