Joni Eareckson Tada

In the summer of 1967, at seventeen years old, Joni Eareckson dove into the shallow water of the Chesapeake Bay and broke her neck. The accident left her a quadriplegic, paralyzed from the shoulders down.

What followed were years of anguish and hard questions — and then, slowly, a different kind of life. She learned to paint holding a brush between her teeth. She told her story in a memoir, Joni, that has reached millions of readers. In 1979 she founded Joni and Friends, an organization that has served people with disabilities around the world for more than four decades.

Joni Eareckson Tada has not been spared hardship — she has lived with chronic pain and faced cancer in the years since. Yet her testimony is not one of mere survival, but of joy discovered through suffering, and of a strength found precisely at the point of weakness.