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Joni Eareckson Tada’s A Place of Healing Ch 1 –Report From The Front Lines
If God sends us on strong paths, we are provided strong shoes. – Corrie ten Boom
This is no time to write a book.
But I have to try.
It won’t be easy. It may not be wise. Nevertheless, if you are reading these words, it has been accomplished, and the book has been published. God be thanked!
So mark it here. I am taking on a task that in–the–no book writers wouldn’t attempt, and setting myself to complete an assignment that military historians would never dream of undertaking. I am writing in the midst of my experience, in the violence of a firefight, in the crush of circumstances, and in the vice grip of unrelenting pain. I am recording my combat- zone observations before the smoke is cleared, before the shells have stopped falling, before the guns have gone silent, before the long grass and wildflowers have grown over the scars of war.
And I am writing with greater urgency. My life is changing, and I want to speak to these issues of suffering in the believer’s life – and yes, to God’s undeniable healing power – while I still can. Incessant pain, as those who lived in its grip can attest, makes it very difficult to think, work, relate, plan, write, and – as I recently discovered – take on a public–speaking opportunity.
Not long ago I was invited to speak to a class at Biola University here in Los Angeles, California. I’d been asked to address Dr. Kathy McReynold’s class on “A Theology of Suffering and Disability,” a course designed by Biola and our Christian Institute on Disability here at the Joni and Friends international Disability Center. Dr. McReynolds had asked me to come and lecture her 65 students on how God redeems suffering. And some of those students, she had told me, had deeper questions than that.
The class met in one of those classrooms in the older part of campus that has no windows – and precious little ventilation. The professor had placed a fan near one of the doors, which I appreciated. Still, without windows and on a warm day in Southern California, the room immediately seemed hot and close
Joni Eareckson Tada’s A Place of Healing Ch 1 –Report From The Front Lines
Joni Eareckson Tada"s A Place of Healing Ch 1