I Was Afraid to Paint the Savior. He Means Everything to Me. (with Justin Kunz)

It was four-thirty in the morning when the picture arrived, unbidden, in Justin Kunz's mind. A woman stood alone in a field of pale stones, holding something close to her chest. He could not yet say what it was, only that the feeling around it was lonely and heavy. So he did what he had done since boyhood. He began to draw. As the sketch took shape, the stones became gravestones, and the bundle in the woman's arms became a baby. He thought of a friend who had been widowed at nineteen, left with a one-year-old child when her young husband did not survive surgery. The image was pure tragedy, and Justin had no idea how he would ever turn it into a painting worth keeping.

The man behind that sketch is Justin Kunz, an illustrator who teaches in the illustration program at Brigham Young University. His art is not confined to galleries. It is struck into the nation's coins and medals, including the $100 American Liberty Gold Coin and both sides of the Congressional Gold Medal honoring a secret World War II deception unit. Before that, he helped build the visual world of World of Warcraft. Yet the painting that grew out of that lonely dawn image, the one he titled Always Remember Him, would become one of the works closest to his heart.

In this episode of Why We Believe, host Nathan Gwilliam sits down with Justin to trace how a gift for making things visible became a lifelong effort to make the Savior visible. Their conversation travels through a teenage promise tested in a quiet bedroom, a freezing mission field in Japan, the halls of a video game studio, and the easel where Christ takes shape on canvas. What ties it together is a single conviction Justin settled when he was young and has lived out ever since.

A Promise Tested in Seminary

Justin was born into the Church and grew up mostly in Utah, but he is the first to say that being raised in something is not the same as knowing it for yourself. As a teenager, church did not hold much pull. What changed him was not a single dramatic event but a habit. In seminary he was encouraged to do more than show up, to read the scriptures on his own, to pray, and to keep a journal, and he kept at it night after night.

Then, during a year studying the Book of Mormon, he decided to act on Moroni's invitation and ask God directly whether it was true. What came was not a new fact or an outside proof, but something quieter and harder to argue with. In an instant he saw a kind of flashback of every time he had acted on what he read and been blessed for it, the strength in a hard moment, the wisdom in a decision, the steady happiness that habit had brought.

The evidence was not in a history book. It was in his own life. From that moment the question was settled, and the only one left was what the Lord wanted him to do with the gift he had been given.

Ninety Percent Hard, Ten Percent Holy

That question led him to a mission in Sapporo, in the freezing north of Japan. By his own honest accounting, about ninety percent of those two years were difficult, exhausting, and cold, full of rejection, an uphill climb with the language, and at one point a flu that laid him out for more than a week.

And yet he would do all of it again, because the other ten percent, the time spent with members and with people learning the gospel, was so sweet that it outweighed everything hard. He watched lives change and felt something he could not manufacture on his own.

For Justin, that ratio became a picture of the whole life of a disciple. Following Christ was never promised to be a bed of roses, and expecting otherwise sets us up for disappointment. But woven through the hardship are blessings rich enough to carry a person, if he has the eyes to see them and the heart to be grateful when they come.

Making the Savior Visible in Gold and on Canvas

After his mission and graduate work, Justin built an unusual career around a single talent. He became one of the first artists in the United States Mint's Artistic Infusion Program, designing coins and medals that now sit in the nation's permanent record, including a gold coin, a Basketball Hall of Fame commemorative, and both sides of the medal given to the secret World War II Ghost Army, a unit of artists who fooled the enemy with inflatable tanks.

For a time he also worked as a senior artist at Blizzard Entertainment, shaping the landscapes of World of Warcraft, pouring his memories of real mountains and holy moments in nature into the worlds he built so that players who believed nothing might still feel something sublime.

But the work he had quietly avoided for years was the one that mattered most. Painting the Savior frightened him. He did not want to do it poorly, and he did not want money to be his reason. Only after he had proven he could make a living another way did he take up the brush and paint the face of the One who means everything to him.

The Painting Only the Faithful Were Meant to See

One painting began with a friend. Justin set out to honor the family of a high school friend whose young daughter was facing a terminal illness, a family later known through the film Love Kennedy. He cast them into a New Testament scene, the moment when Christ raised the daughter of Jairus from death.

In the account, the Savior put out everyone who laughed at Him when He said the girl was only sleeping, and allowed only the parents and three apostles to witness the miracle. Most of Christ's miracles were public, but this one was kept tender and private, reserved for those who had the faith to believe Him.

Justin draws a quiet lesson from that. We do not receive every blessing simply because we want it or feel we deserve it. To witness a miracle is a privilege, not a demand we can make of heaven. Our part is to be faithful, to take the Lord at His word, and to trust that He decides when the miracle comes, wrapped, as his paintings tend to be, in the hope of the resurrection.

A Quiet Witness and a Settled Heart

Justin never felt the need to broadcast his faith at work. He simply lived it, and people noticed. Coworkers caught the way he spoke and sometimes apologized for their language around him. One mentioned that he had seen Justin pass on drinking at the company parties, then admitted, with real longing, that he wished he could do the same.

The key, Justin says, was learning to see every person as a child of God, which turned a secular workplace into a field full of chances to do good. The same perspective shapes how he meets envy and hardship. When he is tempted to want someone else's life, he asks whether he would really trade everything he has, including his own blessings, for that person's life and all of their unseen trials too. The answer is always no, and gratitude rushes back in.

Even the Savior was a man of sorrows. We are not promised an escape from grief, but we are promised that we never walk through it alone.

Key Takeaways

Justin Kunz's story turns on a few simple convictions. Personal revelation is available to anyone willing to study, pray, and put the Lord's promises to the test, just as he did as a teenager. The blessings of discipleship often hide inside the sacrifice, waiting for those who learn to recognize them, the way ten percent of joy outweighed ninety percent of hardship on his mission. A creative gift reaches its highest purpose when it is offered back to Christ to make Him visible to others, even to those who do not yet believe. A testimony can grow stronger in any setting once we see the image of God in the people around us. And gratitude, for family, health, meaningful work, and the love of the Savior, remains the steady antidote to envy and despair.

Thank you for reading this week's blog post inspired by the Why We Believe show. If you are interested in more stories like this, you can check out our other blog posts and episodes at WhyWeBelieve.com, or listen on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

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Follow Nathan Gwilliam LinkedIn: @NathanGwilliam | Website: PodUp.com | Podcasts - Why We Believe: WhyWeBelieve.com | Podcasting Secrets: PodcastingSecrets.com

Follow Justin Kunz Website: justinkunz.com | Instagram: @jkunz.art | U.S. Mint: usmint.gov