For Catholic artist Jordan Ring-Sakabe, discovering the Savior’s divine love has been life-changing. But his path to Christ hasn’t always felt clear.
Jordan grew up in a Christian household. In college, he decided to step away from attending church and identified as atheist for the next nine years. He admits that during that time, he openly mocked Christians, sharing social media posts that made fun of the Bible.
Jordan met his wife at the University of Utah, and they later moved to Seattle, Washington. When the couple was expecting their first daughter, Jordan yearned for stronger moral convictions and guidance to raise a child. “Eventually, I found myself on my knees one night being like, ‘Whatever God is out there who cares about humans, wherever You are, whatever You are, help me to figure out how to best worship You and know You—because I really want to be a good dad for my daughter.’”
Looking back now, Jordan can see countless answers to this prayer.
Accepting a New Worldview
After having more experiences with the Spirit, he ordered a Bible online. Months later, around Christmastime, Jordan heard an advertisement for Handel’s Messiah and felt a wave of emotions overcome him unexpectedly. “I started bawling for some reason, like, the music just hit me hard. The words in my mind that just kept repeating were: ‘There’s something to Jesus.’”
He started investigating different churches, realizing many of his assumptions about various denominations were false. After studying early Christianity in more depth, he decided to convert to Catholicism.
Around this time, Jordan worked full time as a front-end developer and studied painting under the portrait artist Scott Waddell. As his skills developed, Jordan had a specific prompting related to Christ: “The thought would come to my mind constantly: ‘You have to paint me. I want you to paint me.’”
So when his company let him go due to funding issues, he decided to take a leap of faith and pursue art for six months, testing if it might be a financially viable option to support his family.
Walking with Christ
Jordan had painted a portrait of Christ once before as a gift for his parents. But for his second religious painting, he decided to try something that felt even more personal.
The finished painting, Of Such Is the Kingdom, depicts Christ holding hands with his oldest daughter, Luna, who was a toddler at the time. “I wanted to find a way to share the reality that Christ lives, and He wants to walk with us and be with us on this earth, not just after death,” Jordan says. “And that’s available to us as we live His commandments and are deep in His word.”
Within days of posting a reel of the finished painting on social media, his video received thousands of views and likes. Many people connected with the image, including a group Jordan hadn’t anticipated.
“I was really surprised when I saw people commenting, ‘I’m so sorry for your loss,’” Jordan says. “As I kept going down the comment section, I saw handfuls of people who were like, ‘I recently lost a child and have been struggling with that, but seeing this brings so much relief in knowing that Christ has a plan for my child.”
While Jordan didn’t originally intend this message with his painting, he felt an affirmation of the scriptural truth “my ways are not your ways.” God was able to use his painting to help grieving parents feel Christ’s love—just as He used art to touch Jordan’s heart throughout his walk with Christ.
Connecting with Love Itself
Even when he was an atheist, Jordan found himself drawn to religious paintings. Once, while traveling in Germany, he spent half a day looking at art in the Cologne Cathedral. “Let’s just think about that for a second: you can get someone with a completely opposing worldview who wants to be in a religious space,” Jordan reflects. “Why is that? What on earth would make an atheist want to do that? Art. Beauty.
“Beauty is not something that’s just in the eye of the beholder. It’s an objectively true thing. In Catholicism, we call it one of the three transcendentals, along with goodness and truth. Beauty helps to prove God exists.”
Since beautiful art served as a beacon in Jordan’s personal walk with Christ, he strives today to create paintings that help others feel His love as well. “I see myself as a missionary to the agnostic and atheist,” he says. “As Christians, we need to utilize the talents and resources God has granted us to embrace non-believers with love and beauty.”
He recently painted a six-foot-tall, four-foot-wide painting of the Savior, which is designed to help viewers feel like they’re in His presence.
“One day, there I am, standing in front of this painting of Jesus that I’ve done, and I start to just ugly cry,” Jordan reflects. “It just hit so hard that there’s no way that this is not a real person who existed.
“I would love to provide physical proof of all of the different claims about Jesus, but you really just need the spiritual witness. And the religious experience in that moment that I got to have was so compelling and convincing, and it ended with a strong sensation of being loved.”
As Jordan has embraced faith, he’s come to think about experiencing divine love differently. “God is not loving—He is Love. God is not graceful—He is Grace. Like, He’s very literally those things. Without God, there is no love. And so, it’s not, like, when you’re forming a relationship with God, you have to imagine this person living on clouds. No, you are developing a relationship with Love itself.”
More articles for you:
▶ A surgeon’s mistake caused me intense suffering. What I know now about God
▶ What this Hebrew word teaches us about Christ’s nature
▶ How I finally found relief from decades of religious doubt
