At the same time I remembered making a promise to God five years earlier that I would paint a piece glorifying him because of all the success and happiness he had brought me. However, the demands of other work and commitments to publishers and allocations for galleries had kept me from living up to my word. I had put off delivery of what I had promised so many years ago.

Three months before I felt the pains, I had worked on drawings and a concept for a Crucifixion piece, but they lay unpainted. When the pains got so bad that I feared for my life, I began to worry about my family and how my wife and two small sons would deal with my death. I thought about how the boys would need me as their father. With a prayer for forgiveness for breaking my promise, I asked God to take away the pains so that I could fulfill my promise to him. In a fraction of a second, the pains were completely gone. I told God that I would begin the painting I had promised to do the very next day.

That night I finished the commission piece of the angel, and the next day I began the piece which I would call "The Ultimate Sacrifice."

Never before had I felt the motivation I experienced in painting this piece. There was no pre-planning or orchestration in my mind on how the piece would progress to what you see today. I simply knew in my mind what I wanted to do.

As the piece progressed, it developed into what I would call a reflection of ourselves. Christ gave His life so that we could be forgiven in the eyes of God and then hear of the Father's love for us and live. I began to sense the emotions of this moment of Crucifixion. I wanted to visually convey man's mockery, and sometimes even his ignorance, of God's very existence. To do so, I embellished the work as people had done at the time of Christ's death. I scratched a rectangle around Christ. I closed him in, making Him stand out. I scratched "Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews." above his head. Finally, with great emotion, I mixed the red paint for his shed blood. It was something I thought I would never do in a piece like this, but I was moved in my passion to convey the hate of mankind and the tribulation heaped upon Christ. I threw paint on the piece, as I imagined what had happened at the time of his crucifixion.

The blood-stained fingerprints on the canvas are a reflection of man's involvement in the scene on Calvary. The direct lighting focused on Christ's face is the presence of His Father as he witnessed the love and devotion of His only Son, paying the ultimate sacrifice and dying on the cross for all of us, that our sins might be forgiven and that we might live eternally.

It is very hard to explain in words all the strong emotions I experienced when working on this piece. It was like a rebirth for me and is the most important work of my life to date. The internal drive when creating and painting this piece was overwhelming. After completing the work, I thanked God for the use of his hands and for giving me the opportunity to experience something so wonderful, moving and rewarding.