Joanne’s Blog

Good afternoon, Drawing Near to God community! I’m so grateful that many of you are joining me on this journey through Romans, either at our live Teaching & Worship Experience, by streaming or here on the blog. This week we continued our journey with Romans 4, looking at Justification by Faith. Beginning with Romans 1:17, Paul […]

Dear friends, I have a question for you. Do you think that marriage is a dying institution and that there is no longer significance in our society to enter into the sacrament of marriage? I want to address this very personally as someone who has been married for 46 years that it is still of […]

Good afternoon, Drawing Near to God Community! We continued on our journey of Romans this week by looking at God’s Faithfulness as demonstrated by Paul in Romans 3. As followers of my blog know, I like to share some notes from my teaching here on the blog this week so both those members of our […]

Good afternoon and welcome to making space Mondays (for God that is). Some of you have just stumbled onto this blog because you are dealing with what the Bible calls bitter root judgments. Let me just put this out there on the front end. If you are a living-breathing-human being then at some time in […]

Good afternoon, Drawing Near to God community! As those of you who have been following my blog know, we have been journeying through Romas this semester in our Teaching & Worship Experience. I like posting my notes on here so you can get a sense of what we’re studying and you can follow along with […]

This past summer I had the pleasure of watching a violin maker go through the steps of creating a violin. It was quite a remarkable process but each step had a vital purpose from the selecting of the wood for the violin to creating the violin using a template, cutting it out and endless hours carving […]

Good morning fellow travelers attempting to make space for God! I love Mondays when I begin to unpack what has been on my heart during the past week, and I have been focused on the question, ” Why do we sometimes hide our light?” Now let me explain… This comes from a quote that I […]

Romans 1:16-17 For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.   For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith as it is written the righteous shall live by faith.  […]

Friends, we all have a longing to belong; belong in a family, a group of friends, fit in in our workplace, But the biggest desire we have to belong can only be filled by God.  Having a bunch of friends on Instagram or Facebook only gives us a false sense of belonging. Now let’s get […]

Good afternoon, Drawing Near to God Community! Today was a great day as we kicked off our study of Romans with an introduction to this book, which is sometimes referred to as the Biblical Himalayas. Intimidating, right?  You may feel like you’re drinking from a firehose (see this funny video that I showed in my […]