Joni Eareckson Tada was a college-bound seventeen-year-old with grand plans for her life when a dive into a shallow swimming hole left her permanently paralyzed. Unable to move her arms or legs and facing years of rehab, she went into deep depression. She was angry with God and despairing of life. She even wanted her friends to help her commit suicide.

Eventually Joni came through her despair with a strong faith in God and a desire to glorify Him with her life. She became a highly effective Christian writer, artist, singer, and speaker, and she also founded an organization to aid others struggling with disabilities.

Looking back, Joni can see how her severe trial moved her from self-sufficiency to complete dependence on God. In a recent interview she said, “Sometimes healing doesn’t come, and you’ve got to live with it, and when you do you really do learn who you are. God uses suffering. He lobs it like a hand grenade and blows to smithereens these notions we have about our self and who we think we are. Blows it to smithereens until we are left raw, naked, and we have to let suffering do its work.”15

Just as Joni could look back and see how God’s discipline enabled righteousness to flower in her, we can look back and see how His discipline planted the seeds of righteousness within us. I’m not speaking here of the imputed righteousness of God (2 Corinthians 5:21), but of a daily life of practical righteousness: an active, visible goodness that becomes a model to the watching world. This righteousness is a manner of living—a wide set of disciplines developed in the laboratory of life as we learn to live and act in ways that reflect God’s glory. The Scriptures symbolically describe such righteousness as “fine linen, clean and white… the righteousness of saints” (Revelation 19:8 KJV).

He Wants Us to Radiate Peace

It yields the peaceable fruit of righteousness.

—HEBREWS 12:11

You may wonder just how the pursuit of peace fits with the acceptance of God’s discipline. It would seem that struggling through the pain and affliction of discipline would drive away all possibility of peace. Very unpeaceful questions would trouble our minds: Why is God doing this to me? When will it be over? Am I going to survive it? If I do, will I ever recover?

Accepting discipline produces peace in two ways: First, there is a peace that “surpasses all understanding” (Philippians 4:7). It’s a peace that works like a ship’s gyroscope, keeping us upright and stable in a storm. No matter what kinds of turmoil threaten, you have an inner calm that banishes all anxiety because your spirit is steadied by the knowledge that you are in God’s hands.