Joni Eareckson Tada
My life has fallen into a few stages.
As a child, I lived in Box Hill when it was a Village. I then became Pastor to the Slums of Inner Melbourne for eight years. I was then a Country Parson and a Teacher at a One Teacher Bush School out at Jackson Creek in Western Victoria and then for thirteen years, I was a Suburban Minister in one of Australia’s largest suburban ministries.
And now, for more than 20 years I’ve been Superintendent in Sydney of Wesley Mission, Australia’s largest church ministry.
I’ve told you stories of people in each of these places.
Tonight I want you to come with me into the heart of the city.
On of the great joys as coming as the Superintendent of Wesley Mission is that I inherited the Lyceum Theatre. The Lyceum Theatre had a long and very distinguished history as a vaudeville centre, a silent theatre and then finally being the first theatre in Australia to introduce the talkies. The theatre itself has been remodelled several times. It originally had two balconies but following the disastrous fire of 1966 it was remodelled with one balcony and 1350 seats.
The Central Methodist Mission and Wesley Mission as it was later known after the Uniting Church came into being in 1977 and I became Superintendent continued to lease this theatre during week days to Greater Union Theatres. We had a very cooperative and supportive arrangement over all of those years.
But the problem was the inability of the theatre chain to provide good quality film such as people wanted to see in the Lyceum.
We had a strict censorship policy, which indicated that there would be no nudity, no excessive violence, and no sexually explicit language. As you can imagine, the trend in society was such that there were few films made that would fit our criteria.
I had a censor, Stan Manning, who previewed many films to see if they measured up to our criteria. He exercised a faithful and a careful selection process. But I constantly had to make compromised choices.
There were however some brilliant examples of good films that we were able to premiere. We always conducted these charity premieres involving a full theatre with tickets being sold to benefit some area of Wesley Mission’s charitable works. Sometimes we conducted these premieres for other organisations. Always it was a glittering function. In 1979 we premiered ‘My Brilliant Career’. We had all of the actors and actresses present, the producers, directors, and VIPs from across Sydney. This was a very successful film and ran for a long season.
We also premiered an Australian film ‘The Slim Dusty Story’ which told the story of the great outback country singer Slim Dusty. I decided on that occasion that the proceeds from the charity premiere should benefit the Rotary Club of Sydney in their support of a programme for homeless kids organised by the Sydney City Mission. The thing I remember about that film apart from it being a very enjoyable night was an error I made when I came out on stage at the end of the film to talk about the support those attending had given to the work of the Sydney Rotary Club. For some reason that I now don’t comprehend, I had made a bad decision. Slim Dusty was interstate that night of the premiere of his own film. That was a great disappointment to us. Quite naively and wrong, I decided that I would walk on to the stage as if I were Slim Dusty. I had met him, knew his mannerisms and we were of approximately the same height. I wore clothes similar to what he wore, a leather waistcoat, carried a guitar and wore a typical Slim Dusty Akubra hat. I walked out on stage expecting a whole lot of people to greet me with laughter at trying to look like Slim Dusty, however the apparition was too good. People thought I was Slim Dusty and 1300 people rose as one people to applaud the celebrated Australian.
I hadn’t meant that to happen at all. It was a disaster. I took off my hat and tossed away the guitar and very clearly showed who I was but I had fooled the people and of course this made some of them quite angry. It was a bad decision and I should never have done it.
There was no danger of that happening with the next film we premiered in 1980. It was the magnificent film ‘Joni’, the story of Joni Eareckson Tada, the remarkable quadriplegic.
Joni was a bright athletic girl of 17 who dived into Chesapeake Bay and broke her neck. The result was several years of absolute despair and frustration and unable to move any muscle in her body. She could not even be successful in killing herself. However her Christian faith changed her total outlook. The book ‘Joni’ which was published in 1976 was her best selling autobiography. In it she is splendidly honest about her struggles with despair “Why can’t they just let me die?” she asked. When she realised that she would never walk again or use her arms or be able to marry her boyfriend she was bewildered and angry and she felt betrayed by God. Her friend Diana said, ‘the past is dead, Joni, you are alive.’ ‘Am I?’ Joni responded, ‘this isn’t living.’ Her boyfriend left her.
But Joni re-evaluated the fundamental meaning of life. She decided that life was more than mobility, that living was to be fulfilled with other talents and abilities, which were latent within her. She started to develop what has become an extraordinary skill in drawing and painting with her mouth. She also gained a spiritual perspective coming to see her paralysis as only temporary, and that one day by God’s grace she will receive a new and glorious body. Meanwhile, her chair is a tool to fashion her to become more like Jesus Christ. On one occasion Joni told 2000 young people, “God transformed an immature and headstrong teenager into a self reliant young woman who is learning to rejoice in suffering.”
Joni started helping other people in wheelchairs and the triumphant film of her life was an absolute inspiration.
Because Wesley Mission is so committed to helping disabled people I decided we should premiere the film before a maximum crowd in the Lyceum Theatre, but it would be a different crowd. We would take out rows and rows of seating and provide access for hundreds of wheelchairs. We would arrange special transport to bring hundreds of intellectually and physically disabled people as our guests to this premiere. It was a brilliant occasion with the place absolutely packed with disabled people all of whom left with a new sense of their own worth and with encouragement to find what latent talents and abilities they had within themselves.
Unfortunately Joni was not able to be there for the premiere. But I had made contact with her and over the next twenty years have become close friends. We have met together when we have both been speaking at important functions in London, Amsterdam and the United States. I have interviewed her many times on radio and she has visited Australia on two occasions.
Twenty -years ago she established an organization ‘Joni and Friends.’ This is a disability outreach service. It is dedicated to extending the love and message of Christ to people affected by disability, whether it is a disabled person, a family member or a friend. The aim and purpose of Joni and Friends is to meet the physical spiritual and emotional needs of a group of people in very practical ways. They are committed to recruiting, training and motivating a whole new generation of people with disabilities who can become leaders in churches and communities. Apart from that they equip and mobilise churches to be aware of disability services and they train churches in how to care for the disabled. They also have in about 50 countries of the world a program of supplying wheelchairs for disabled people who cannot afford them.
More than a million people read her book and she has written 11 other best selling books since that time. The full length feature film in which she plays herself has been seen all over the world and today she has a daily radio program on more than 600 radio stations around the world, listened to by millions of listeners. Joni, apart from being the founder and president of ‘Joni and Friends’, serves on the National Council for Disability to which President Reagan appointed her in 1987. She has given 14 years of outstanding national leadership in this position. She is also the chairperson of the Christian Council on Persons with Disabilities, a national consortium of Christian ministries serving disabled persons.
Love came into her life when she married Ken Tada, a high school social studies teacher. Ken is a very friendly bloke, a huge mountain of a man who was an excellent athlete and who had trained in weightlifting. She really needed a partner like Ken because he picks her up out of her wheelchair and carries her in his arms as if she were a lightweight. She has travelled with Ken to many foreign countries. She’s been honoured with a Doctorate of Humanities degree and has been the chairperson of a special program of education in China for disabled Chinese. She’s been honoured in many parts of the world. Over the years that I have known her it has been my privilege to interview her on many occasions and for her to tell her story to my listeners.
I will always remember Joni on one of her visits to Wesley Centre. I had arranged an afternoon tea for hundreds of people in wheelchairs together with their careers and others who had intellectual and other types of physical disabilities. The big auditorium was filled with some of the saddest looking people that you have ever seen. They were people who were blind deaf mute, paralysed, paraplegic quadriplegic, Downs syndrome and a whole range of other disabilities. Wheelchairs were packed into every available space and to a healthy, fit able-bodied person it seemed to be a very depressing sight. And then through the double doors came Joni in her electric wheelchair and the place became alive with excitement, clapping and cheering as she drove around the circle. She spoke to everybody and her touch upon the lives of so many people who’s bodies or minds may have been broken and frail was absolutely electrifying. We saw people come alive with enjoyment. She had this remarkable impact upon the lives of some of the most disadvantaged people in our community.
I was to see the same thing happen the next day when the special van in which she travelled in her wheelchair pulled up outside the Lottie Stewart Hospital and she motorised down the ramp and into the large public auditorium at our hospital in Dundas. We have a spinal unit where many young men and women are like her. They had broken their spinal cords, usually in accidents on motorbikes and motorcars and most were paraplegic or quadriplegic. Many others suffered from Motor Neuro disease and Huntington’s disease and they were confined to wheelchairs too. Into that group cam Joni and the magic of her presence lifted those who were present with a great deal of excitement and enjoyment. Her presence again was electrifying in encouraging people and giving them hope.
I remember her telling me once of an incredible story.
She had attempted with her husband Ken a Special Olympics in Los Angeles for brain damage and intellectually delayed people. Ken was the starter of the races and was responsible as a marshal for gathering people for their due track event. Everybody was excited. Joni in her wheelchair drew up in the grandstands so she could watch Ken and watch all the other disabled people. He was pinning numbers on the back of each contestant and then called up the runners in a hundred-metre race. Ken blew the signal for the contestants to line up. There was a Downs Syndrome girl with thick glasses and a big smile who kept jumping up and down on the spot clapping her hands. There was a short, stocky mentally handicapped boy in baggy grey shorts and a tall gangly young man who waved to his family in the stands and quite a few others. They couldn’t contain themselves with excitement. The moment for the start came, there was a moment of stillness and then the starting gun went and off they ran, the contestants bobbing down the track to the wild cheers of the crowd. Suddenly one of the runners, a Downs Syndrome boy in a blue T-shirt, went off the track and began running towards some friends who were standing on the infield. Ken blew his whistle, waved and called to the boy trying to direct him back on to the track. It was no use; this one man was heading in the wrong direction. It was then one of the other runners; the girl with thick glasses noticed his detour. She stopped a few yards from the finish line while the other contestants ran past her. She called out to a fellow runner on the infield ‘Hey come this way!’ When the boy in the blue T-shirt heard the friends voice he stopped and turned ‘round. The girl with the thick glasses waved to him and called him again. ‘This is the right way!’
The young man stood there and looked around confused. Seeing her smile on her face, he started to move as she ran towards him, gave him a big hug as she met up with him and they linked elbows and together got back on the track and finished the race arm in arm. They were last across the finishing line by a long way but the entire crowd cheered them. Some clapped, many cheered and most found it hard to hold back tears. Here was something special.
As Joni told me that story I suddenly knew that this was in essence what she was doing in her ministry. She and each of us should reach out to the disabled, it doesn’t matter if it’s going to cost us time and effort, but if we reach out to them, link arms with them and go with them towards the finishing line, both of us will be victors. That is the aim of our ministry and that of Joni Earickson Tada.
The city of Sydney would grow to be one of the world’s great cities and Wesley Mission would grow to be one of the world’s great churches and I was privileged to spend each day in the heart of both.