Word: eareckson
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Joni Eareckson's special ministry for the disabled...
Joni (pronounced Johnny) Eareckson doesn't surfer the kind of deformity that causes people to point or stare. With her pretty girl-next-door looks, radiant smile, and pert, no-nonsense personality, she is a popular speaker on the Evangelical Protestant celebrity circuit and to nonreligious groups. As she readily admits, she is treated better than most of her fellow disabled Americans. But Joni Eareckson, 31, is totally paralyzed from the neck down...
During her first months in the hospital, she was so helpless that she could not even do what she longed to do-take her own life. She begged a girlfriend to do it for her several times, but the friend refused. Encased in a canvas Stryker frame, Eareckson felt life was meaningless. "All those yardsticks for success that had come to mean so much to me were shattered-being pretty and popular, dating the right guys." The first time she went shopping for clothes, "they just hung on me like a sack." After waves of depression and a phase...
During 1981, the United Nations' International Year of Disabled Persons, Eareckson's group will expand seminars to prod Americans into doing more to help this neglected minority. Eareckson consciously puts what she calls "the celebrity thing" to good use in this crusade. "Friends who are disabled look on me as a bridge between themselves and the able-bodied population who, for the most part, wouldn't give them the time...