Evangelical author Joni Eareckson Tada, a quadriplegic for 56 years, says her entry into heaven will be like the end of a marathon.

“Sometimes I think when I get to heaven, I imagine a celestial sandy shore, and like a marathoner, [I’m] running through the tape,” she told The Washington Times in a video interview. “I get on the other side, I fall to the sand, heaving, gasping ‘I made it, I made it.’”

At 74, the Baltimore native knows she’s living on borrowed time: About 47% of people who suffered the type of spinal injury she incurred in 1967 were likely to survive 40 years. What’s more, the life expectancy today for a 20-year-old with her type of spinal injury is less than 34 years, with pneumonia and cardiovascular disease the most common causes of death for quadriplegics, statistical data show.

“Nobody, nobody lives as long as I do,” she said from her home in the Los Angeles suburbs, where she wrote the recently published “The Practice of the Presence of Jesus: Daily Meditations on the Nearness of Our Savior.”

Mrs. Tada has written some 50 books, with “Joni: An Unforgettable Story,” her 1976 autobiography last updated two years ago, likely the most famous. That book, and a subsequent movie produced by evangelist Billy Graham’s World Wide Pictures studio, propelled her to evangelical celebrity status.

She was 17 when she dived from an offshore raft into the Chesapeake Bay and hit something that caused her neck to snap and sever her spinal cord. Medical professionals call it a tetraplegia spinal injury, resulting in an inability to move the upper and lower parts of the body. Quadriplegic is the more common term.

Though her body was broken, her spirit, determination and sense of purpose have remained strong.

“I really love my life. I love serving God through our wheelchair delivery ministry and our retreats for families dealing with disabilities. It’s just such a joy. I’m so grateful that I’ve got energy, strength, and stamina to keep doing it,” Mrs. Tada said.

Ken Tada, her husband of 43 years, is a retired high school teacher who now works with her ministry, Joni and Friends.

“He is just a delight to live with,” she said. “I’m very grateful to have such a man who enjoys reading the Word every day. He’s spiritually very open to the Lord Jesus, and that’s a handsome thing about him.”

He and other assistants help her, but she’s highly self-sufficient, having driven a specially adapted van. Mrs. Tada writes her books using a Plantronics wireless headset and Dragon Naturally Speaking, a dictation program she’s used for decades.

Beset by chronic pain, she acknowledges challenges remain.

“My paralysis is one thing, [but] chronic pain makes it harder … it makes my quadriplegia feel like a walk in the park,” she said. The pain “has not decreased my intimacy, my fellowship, my daily communion with the Lord Jesus, [which] has been so sweet, so precious.”

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Mrs. Tada returned to a book she’d not read in a while, “The Practice of the Presence of God” by Brother Lawrance, a 17th-century monk, and rediscovered the value of intimacy with God and Jesus.

“I want to talk about the intimacy of knowing Christ, and that day-to-day way he dealt with pots and pans and scrubbing latrines, the ordinary menial tasks of his day,” she said. “I deal with leg bags and wheelchair batteries and things of that sort — the ordinary, everyday things of my day.”

“Our culture of comfort and convenience has dumbed down, as it were, our relationship with God, we tuck him away on a shelf and bring him out when we need him,” she said. “But for the most part, it’s take a shower in the morning, eat breakfast, get dressed, walk out the front door and you’re on automatic cruise control.”

Asked why many Western Christians have “fallen asleep” to the core message of dependence upon God, Mrs. Tada blames basic selfishness.

“We think of ourselves first,” she said. “Pride is on the throne of our hearts. We are our own little tyrants of our tiny little kingdoms, the kingdom of self. We ignore God. And when we do, we miss out on peace and pleasure and joy and endurance and patience in trials.”

Her hope is that the devotional messages in her new book will lead people to a fresh perspective when trials befall them.

“I would want when suffering hits, when you are hit with some hard disappointment, instead of thinking, ‘Oh, darn, what? What am I going to do?’ I would love for people to default to [saying] ‘God, I’m surprised by this, but you must have an idea of what’s going on, and help me help me understand it,’” she said.

• Mark A. Kellner can be reached at mkellner@washingtontimes.com.