A Marriage Made in Heaven - The extraordinary love story of Joni Eareckson Tada and Ken Tada

After being becoming a quadriplegic, unable to use her hands or legs, after a tragic 1967 diving accident in Chesapeake Bay, Joni Eareckson was so depressed that she even contemplated suicide.

"I'm just so grateful there were no Jack Kevorkian's around back then because my problem wasn't so much my quadriplegia; it was clinical depression," Joni told me in an interview at her Joni and Friends International Disability Center in Agoura Hills, CA.

"I just needed somebody to come alongside me and show me the ropes and teach me and lead me through the maze of questions I had to the point where I could say that 'I can do this. I really can live life in a wheelchair and live it with a smile, not in spite of the problems but miraculously because of them.'

"And because I began to lean harder on Jesus, the stronger you discover Him to be and the more you realize what you can do."

Today, Joni is an internationally known mouth artist, a talented vocalist, a radio host, author of 17 books and an advocate for disabled persons worldwide, but in those early days of her disability the last thing was on the mind was marriage, after all who would want to marry someone confined to a lifetime in a wheelchair?

Fast forward to the early 1980s when Joni was attending Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California, pastored by John MacArthur.  By now, she was an international celebrity, having written Joni, her autobiography and even starred as herself in the movie of the same name.

Watching her across the church just after the film Joni had been released was Ken Tada, a history teacher and school grid iron football coach.

"Joni was the main speaker at a Young Life banquet at the church and from a distance I could just barely see a gentleman who was seated next to her who I thought was her husband," Ken began as Joni sat next to him.

"I thought what she said was fantastic and I was going to go up to speak to her, but the crowd was just too big. So it wasn't until the year afterward that we had some mutual friends who were trying to fix us up and I was invited to a surprise birthday party for Joni. At it, we started talking and realized we had some things in common and so I finally asked her out for a date."

Ken smiled as he continued, "I had never taken anyone out in a wheelchair before, and so this was a new experience. I knew enough though that if we were going to go out on our first date by ourselves then I was going to have to lift Joni in and out of her wheelchair.

"So at the high school where I was teaching and coaching football I worked out with weights for the whole week with the idea that I wouldn't drop her on our first date. I had set a goal at the time of being able to curl a hundred-eighty pounds."