In 1967, when she was a promising athletic teenager, Joni Erickson Tada broke her neck in a diving accident, leaving her totally and permanently paralyzed. She spent twenty-five years in a wheel chair, but then failing health forced her to go back to bed. To cheer her, her loving husband hung a bird feeder outside her window. At first she envied the birds their freedom, but then she remembered what Jesus said about sparrows. She wrote, “If the great God of heaven concerns herself about a little ragtag sparrow, He cares about me.” She remembered that Jesus said we are worth more than many sparrows so how God must have loved you and me, to give Jesus, His Son to provide forgiveness, cleansing from sin and someday a home in heaven. And what a great truth is enclosed in the words, “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have everlasting life.”

Pastor Alex Rockwell