To beat self-pity, get dressed and help someone worse off

Joni Eareckson Tada, the disability advocate who has been quadriplegic since a diving accident broke her neck when she was 17, was talking about how pride keeps people stuck in self-pity. Her remedy, she said, is deliberately practical.

She put it this way: "Get up, get dressed, take your shower, put on your makeup if you have to, but please go out your door tomorrow morning and find somebody whose situation is worse than yours and serve them."

She said she learned the habit of serving someone worse off by seeing need abroad. After visiting 57 developing nations, poor countries with little medical care, she said, she is mindful that people with her level of injury mostly die early there. So the disabled people she meets have milder paralysis, paraplegics and stroke survivors who spend their lives confined to bed, and, in her words, "a kid with cerebral palsy is lying on a dirt mat on a dirty kitchen floor because he doesn't have a wheelchair." Noticing them, she said, reminds her of God's mercy and generosity toward her.

She was asked whether, after years of pushing for disability rights in Washington, she is ever tempted to tell people they do not know how good they have it compared with 1980, before the campaign that led to the Americans with Disabilities Act. She answered on what she called a global scale. She said she wishes Americans could visit Mozambique or the edge of Lima, Peru, or join a brief service trip to poor areas of Mexico, to see that Americans live "in a bubble."

After she recently lost the use of her right arm and could no longer feed herself, she invited neighbors to feed her dinner to give her husband a break, and before the meal she blesses the hands that feed her. Even being served, she believes, has itself become a way of serving.