In Isaiah 57:8 we read "'For My ways are not your ways, Nor are your thoughts my thoughts,' says The Lord." And Paul amplifies this when he says of the Lord, "For the foolishness of God wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. (I Cor. 1:25).

From the beginning God seems to have put these choices in the path of man: in the Garden East of Eden; When he gave the Law; and When the people of Israel were going in to conquer the Land of Canaan. Finally, God put the ultimate choice square in the middle of our lives: the Cross and it's shame or our own righteousness accomplished by our own adherence to some Old Testament fragments, or even all of it, or a more modern derived Christian Law, the so called "Golden Rule" and "Love thy neigh- bor as you love yourself."

The trouble is that our sin nature always impells us to make the wrong choices, based on our own wisdom or external evidance. We forget that God's wisdom is so much greater than ours that often what looks like a tragedy is one of God's blessings in disguise. If it isn't a blessing, it will turn into one by His power if we do the extremely difficult part of trusting Him and believing that He is doing what He said He is doing: working in that situation for good. (Rom. 8:28)

It's in the midst of the testing of troubles and tragedy that God may be giving us His greatest blessings. One person who found this out after some 15 years of struggle accepting her plight is Joni Olsen. Her story begins in a luke-warm Christian setting and her relationship wasn't as close to the Lord as even she would like it to be. To make matters worse, she has an active sex life with the man she was planning to marry.

When she was 17, the Lord began to move on her and call her to minister. She realized that her life style wasn't consistent with going to a Seminary and yet she couldn't give up what had become an entrenched habit. So she prayed earnestly, for the first time in her life that God do something in a hurry to change her if it was His will for her to go into the ministry. And then promptly forgot about it, figuring God would make her strong enough to change. Don't ever pray a prayer like that if you aren't expecting a tragedy.

That summer, she was diving in the water and didn't come up. When her friends brought her up and revived her, it was discovered that she had broken her spinal chord in her lower neck. She was a quadraplegiac and she would be the rest of her life, dependent on others, able to have physical sex but not able to enjoy it because she had no feeling anywhere in her body. But God was working in that accident. The break occurred at just the point where her vital organs would function, and she could move her head and talk and eat and her other daily functions worked perfectly. Later she got minimal use of some of one hand and the other arm, and with braces she could feed her- self. She also had a choice to make: accept God's answer to her prayer, or rebel and become a bitter enemy of God.

At the end of her painful odessy toward acceptance of God's answer to her prayer in which she more than once begged people to kill her, since she couldn't do it herself, she made the choice to dedicate what was left to God IF He could use it. "If he could use it." He has since helped her develop talents that she didn't know she possessed to make greeting cards, paint in water-colors and oils, make an album of Christian praise songs. And she goes to hospitals to lead the crippled to the Lord. In short, she got to be the minister that God wanted her to be. And as an added blessing He granted her a husband, not the one she planned to marry, but one who was willing to live the celebate life required to live with her, and minister to her needs and who loved the real Joni.

A reading of her autobiography (written by her while holding the pencil in her mouth and painstakingly writing every letter of every word in block letters) is well worth the effort. The title is "Joni," but it will be hard to get hold of since she wrote it some 25 years ago and she has developed quite a bit since the writing of it. But she details all the suffering and pain of a totally disabled person and how God used what seemed to be useless to accomplish great things for Him and use what was left to bring 1,000's to the Lord. Her choice was to accept what had happened to her and surrender it to the Lord, or live the rest of her life in bitterness and hatred of a God who would do such a thing as this to her. She chose the first and that made a big difference in her life and in the lives of others.