Then he handed her a card with a prayer on it, and told her to memorize it, and to rely on it whenever she needed guidance. She knew the prayer and had recited it many times, but from that point forward, it became the guiding principle of her life:

Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace;

Where there is hatred, let me sow love;

Where there is injury, pardon;

Where there is error, truth;

Where there is doubt, faith;

Where there is despair, hope;

Where there is darkness, light;

And where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master, Grant that I may not so much seek

To be consoled as to console;

To be understood as to understand;

To be loved as to love.

For it is in giving that we receive;

It is in pardoning that we are pardoned;

And it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

The “Prayer of Saint Francis” said everything she needed to know as she began her journey toward a life of ministry.

After she graduated from the University of Chicago, Joanna studied at the Chicago Theological Seminary, and spent several years as a visiting assistant pastor at several churches in the Midwest. She returned to Chicago to open a home for battered women, and decided that would be the focus of her work. She was repulsed at how often men would take advantage of women because they were stronger and larger, and how vulnerable these women and their children were. Joanna, on the other hand, was fearless. She thought nothing of placing herself between a man filled with hate and righteousness and his wife and child, and sometimes—but not always—could tame the wildest of beasts. She had purposely chosen a dangerous profession.

In 1995, she moved to Cleveland to join the ministry of the man she had met and married, who had devoted his life to working with young men who had been abandoned by their fathers, which was his experience. The cycle of violence had to be broken, and so she and Richard grew their ministry in a tiny church they purchased from the city for a dollar on Fifty-fifth Street. They were surrounded by crime and drug dealers, but neither of them feared for their own safety. They were guided.