The Night the Journey Began

The Night the Journey Began

From Two Words to One Hundred Faces

An excerpt from The 100 Faces of Jesus: An Inspirational Guide to a Christian Existence

by Kenneth Schilling

It was late one night in April of 2023 when I suddenly awakened.

There was no easel in front of me. No canvas. No sketch waiting to be completed. Yet in the

stillness of that night, two words came to me with a clarity I could not ignore:

“Paint Jesus.”

I had been an artist for more than twenty years. I had painted landscapes, portraits, florals,

abstracts, and countless other subjects. But in all those years, I had never painted Jesus.

Perhaps I had avoided Him because I understood the enormity of the subject. How could I

possibly paint the face of Christ? What expression would I give Him? What would His eyes

reveal? How could paint and canvas communicate the humanity and divinity of the Son of God?

I didn’t have the answers.

But I knew what I had heard.

Paint Jesus.

The following morning, I went to my studio and began.

There was no grand plan. I did not sit down and outline a series of one hundred paintings. There

was no book proposal, no ministry, no carefully constructed roadmap.

There was simply a canvas and a calling.

I painted the first face.

And then something happened.

I wanted to paint another.

The first painting had not answered my questions about Jesus. Instead, it created more of them.

There was another expression I wanted to explore, another moment from His life I wanted to

contemplate, another emotion I wanted to understand.

One painting became two.

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Two became five.

Five became ten.

And still the faces kept coming.

Discovering Jesus at the Easel

With every painting, I began to realize that there could never be a single face that expressed

everything I wanted to say about Jesus.

How do you capture the tenderness of the man who welcomed children and the authority of the

man who commanded the wind and waves to be still?

How do you paint the compassion of the healer alongside the sorrow of the suffering servant?

How do you portray the infant in the manger, the teacher on the hillside, the man praying alone,

the Savior carrying the cross, and the risen Christ?

I began exploring them one canvas at a time.

Some paintings came from Scripture. Others began with an image or an emotion that entered

my imagination. Some seemed to arrive almost completely formed in my mind. Others

developed slowly as I worked.

My style of Abstracted Realism—ABREAL became particularly meaningful during this

journey. The realism allowed me to portray the humanity of Jesus, while abstraction gave me

the freedom to explore something more difficult to define—the mystery, emotion, movement,

and transcendence surrounding Him.

But something else was happening that I had not anticipated.

I was not simply studying the face of Jesus.

I was studying His character.

The more I painted His compassion, the more I thought about compassion in my own life.

The more I painted His suffering, the more I contemplated sacrifice.

The more I painted His humility, forgiveness, strength, obedience, and love, the more those

qualities began asking something of me.

The paintings were becoming personal.

When the Paintings Began Speaking to Others

Then people began encountering them.

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Visitors would walk into my gallery and stop in front of a particular painting.

Some would simply stand quietly.

Others wanted to talk.

Some shared stories from their own lives. Some spoke about their faith. Some spoke about loss,

illness, family, fear, or hope.

And some were moved to tears.

That changed the way I understood what was happening.

These paintings were no longer simply works of art hanging on the walls of my studio.

They were creating encounters.

A person might walk past several paintings and then suddenly stop before one particular face.

Something in that expression spoke to them.

I could not predict which painting it would be.

I could not manufacture the response.

And I did not always know why it happened.

I began to understand that my responsibility was not to control what people experienced.

My responsibility was to keep painting.

One Hundred Faces

Eventually, the idea of The 100 Faces of Jesus emerged.

One hundred seemed enormous.

Could I really paint Jesus one hundred different ways without simply repeating myself?

But the deeper I went into the life and character of Christ, the more I realized the problem was

not finding enough to paint.

The problem was that there was too much.

Compassion. Mercy. Justice. Sorrow. Joy. Humility. Strength. Sacrifice. Forgiveness.

Servanthood. Authority. Grace. Love.

The manger. The miracles. The prayers. The teachings. The cross. The resurrection.

Every painting seemed to open another door.

And eventually, one painting became one hundred.

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When I completed the hundredth face, I experienced something difficult to describe. There was

certainly a sense of accomplishment, but there was also a realization that the number one

hundred did not represent an ending.

I could paint another hundred and still never fully capture Jesus.

Perhaps that was the greatest lesson of the entire project.

The infinite cannot be contained by the canvas.

Then the Paintings Became a Book

As the collection grew, another realization began to take shape.

The paintings had stories behind them.

There were reasons each image had been created. There were Scriptures that spoke to the

meaning of the paintings. There were lessons I had encountered while creating them.

I began to wonder:

What if the viewer could go beyond the painting?

What if each image became the beginning of a spiritual reflection?

That question eventually became this book:

The 100 Faces of Jesus: An Inspirational Guide to a Christian Existence.

Each painting would be accompanied by the inspiration behind it, Scripture, a devotion,

reflection, prayer, and poetry.

The artwork would open the door.

The words would invite the reader to walk through it.

My hope became that someone might spend time with a painting, read the Scripture, consider

the devotion, pray the prayer, and then simply become still before God.

The book would not merely be a catalog of one hundred paintings.

It would become a journey.

And the Book Became a Ministry

But even the book did not feel like the final destination.

By then I had witnessed too many people responding personally to the paintings.

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I began thinking about what might happen if these images could travel farther than the walls of

my gallery.

Into homes. Into churches. Into exhibitions. Into hospitals. Into places where someone might

desperately need hope.

That vision became The 100 Faces of Jesus — A Sacred Art Ministry.

What began as two words in the middle of the night had become something I never could have

planned.

A painting became a series.

The series became one hundred faces.

The faces became a book.

And the book became part of a ministry devoted to carrying the image and message of Jesus

Christ into the world.

Looking Back at That Night

I sometimes think back to that night in April 2023.

Had I known everything that would follow, perhaps those two words would have seemed

overwhelming.

One hundred paintings? A book? A Sacred Art Ministry?

That was not what I heard.

I heard only what I needed to hear at that moment:

“Paint Jesus.”

Perhaps that is how God sometimes works in our lives.

He does not show us the entire road.

He simply gives us the next step.

Our responsibility is to take it.

I got out of bed that night with two words on my heart.

The next morning, I picked up a brush.

And one canvas at a time, the road unfolded before me.

Today, when I look at these one hundred faces, I see far more than a collection of paintings.

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I see a journey of faith.

I see the people who stood before them.

I see the conversations they began.

I see the questions they caused me to ask about my own life.

And I see the extraordinary way something can grow when we are willing to respond to a

simple calling.

It began with two words.

“Paint Jesus.”

I did.

And somewhere along the journey, I discovered that while I was painting His face,

He was changing my heart.

Kenneth Schilling

The 100 Faces of Jesus — A Sacred Art Ministry

the100facesofjesus.com

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