For nearly 25 years, William Johnson Jr. has demonstrated his Christian faith through his artwork.
The Annville-area man crafts custom-made metal artwork that shows his faith and, when asked, opens a door for him to share his spiritual journey with others. He takes orders for sports and nature metal works, too.
“No doubt our biggest sale is the crosses and things related to the Christian faith,” said Johnson, who added that it comprises 85 percent of his hobby/business. “Another interesting thing is over the course of the last 22 years the overwhelming amount of sales that we’ve had that have gone to New Jersey.”
He may not definitively know why his work is so popular in the Garden State, but he has some ideas. Johnson has around 50 different pieces at any time in inventory for sale. Besides crosses, he makes knives, trees, bicyclists and even a tree-themed chandelier.
“I don’t know why. I would theorize maybe it’s that we’ve done a lot of publicity through Shady Maple (restaurant) and that we have work placed in conference centers around the Philadelphia area,” said Johnson. “So there’s a lot of visibility there. So when people go for a retreat, they see the crosses and then there’s a little plaque on there that says who built it. And a lot of times we get referrals through that.”
Johnson takes orders in various sizes for Name and Message crosses. The Message Cross sizes are 28, 36, 48 and 96 inches and are made at his business called Iron Nature. He said he fulfills all orders in time for Christmas that are placed by Nov. 1.
He’s crafted over 1,000 crosses, with the message-themed being the most popular. Those crosses contain iconic words such as “faith,” “grace” and “forgiveness,” while the name-based crosses depict titles used to describe God like “Lord of All,” “Eternal Father” and “Prince of Life.”
“We did figure it out a couple years ago and it was amazing because we have so many different models that we make and certain ones have sold quite well. The Message Cross is our highest-selling piece,” said Johnson. “To my recollection, I think we’re at 578 or so of the Message Cross, just that particular (28-inch) version.”
Those are standard sizes with other customers asking him to make custom ones as well.
Each cross is individually crafted since there is no mold to make them exactly the same. He designs his crosses out of nails, adding he’s not sure of the exact amount but estimates that under 1,000 are needed for the 28-inch variety.
“Occasionally, there’ll be a person that wants a custom cross. They want it to be five feet or something that we don’t make, and that’s a custom order. But yeah, on the website, the crosses are shown as to what sizes we offer,” added Johnson.
There’s two-fold symbolism behind the use of nails in his cross creations.
“It’s actually a two-fold thing. It was designed to represent the construction process but the nails – the crosses being made of nails – is exactly how you describe it,” said Johnson. “There is a lot of pain and suffering with the fact that His hands and His feet were nailed to the cross. That theme resounds throughout every piece.”
Individuals who were crucified in Roman times were hung on a wooden cross by nails that were driven through the hands and feet to hold the executed in place and to heighten and prolong their suffering, according to the Bible and other historic sources.
The other reason Johnson uses nails is related to how he started this venture.
After about 30 members of the Hershey Free Evangelical Church decided to start a seed church in the Jonestown area, the church family bought land, kept half and sold the rest to a developer to build adjacent homes so that those families would have a place to worship.
“Our pastor has this incredible idea. The vision was beautiful. So the houses are being built, the church is being built. We moved into the church and the pastor came up with this really neat idea while the church was being built in the latter stages. Why don’t we pass out bags of nails to each of the family members in the church?” said Johnson. “The pastor says, ‘Take these nails home and as a family take one nail out a day and pray about our church and pray about new people coming from all these houses or pray for the worker’s safety and pray that God’s message would be heard by the surrounding Jonestown community.’ In other words, just creatively pray about the building of this church.”
Johnson said the pastor asked the nails to be returned several weeks later, and that’s when something happened that would change the course of his life and allow him to share his faith, his talent and creativity in a new and bold way.
“So, we turned them back in, our bucket of nails,” said Johnson. “And there was a lady in church who knew I was a metal shop teacher and she knew that I love metalworking. And she said, ‘Bill, would you consider building something from these nails that we could put into our new building?’”
By then, 2000 had turned into 2001 and Johnson said that’s when a miracle occurred.
“This is where I call the magic that really happened in my life, that changed my life for the next 22 years,” recalled Johnson. “I said to her, ‘Yes, I would love to think about it. I don’t know what I would do, but I’d love to think about it.’”
During morning devotions, during prayer and whenever he paused to give it some thought, Johnson found himself dwelling on how he could use those nails in a significant way.
“I began to ask God, ‘What could I do with these nails that would be meaningful for our church?’” remembered Johnson. “And I just prayed about it every day. I prayed about it for about three weeks and after that period of time of just thinking about it, an idea came to me. It was something I believe was supernatural. I just never thought about this on my own. The idea was to take all these nails and weld them together in the shape of a cross. So you would look at this and from a distance you’d say, ‘Okay, it’s a cross.’”
But what he would do next would extend beyond constructing a mere cross.
“If you took the time to walk towards that cross, draw near it, you would begin to notice that there’s something written in it. And when I thought about what would be the words that would be written in it, I thought about how Christ changed my life. I thought about how when I was in Millersville and I finally made that decision to give my life to Christ, what did it mean to me?
“Well, it meant that I was forgiven,” said Johnson. “It meant that I now had hope, life, truth, love, victory, joy, grace, peace. All those things are what a person gets when they finally say, ‘Okay, I don’t want to lead my life by myself. I want You to come into my life.’”
Called “Cross of Nails,” every one of his crosses since the first one he built has contained some kind of message or names that are cornerstones of the Christian faith.
“So that’s what I put on. I put those words across the top. So I built this thing and it was seven and a half feet tall and was made from all the nails that the people had prayed over,” he said.
In many ways, Johnson’s journey in life led him to this point – even if the pathway was non-linear and sometimes bumpy.
When he was a teenager, he loved shop class, but hated high school. However, Johnson eventually became a shop teacher and worked for 30 years at Hempfield High School before retirement. Today, he calls his teaching career the best job he’s ever had in his life.
“I’m thankful for the lack of direction in my life because as I look back over the process I could have easily gone a different direction. But as it lined up and as I’ve lived through my life and seeing the gradual progression of up and down to get somewhere, it helped me to be good at what I did in teaching in high school,” he said.
That was crucial because when he was teaching, it was like looking at his younger self in a mirror.
“When I was teaching high school kids, guess what? They were just like me in high school. A lot of them. A lot of kids would sign up for my class and never did any kind of work before with their hands and they’d get in there and find their connection just like me,” noted Johnson. “I mean, I was that lost high school kid who shop class saved. Well, I worked with hundreds of kids like that. And I’m really, really thankful that I did eventually end up in teaching because it made me understand and be better about what I do. I absolutely love teaching. It was the greatest career I ever had.”
Before teaching and prior to becoming a born-again Christian, Johnson was a welder when he got laid off work with the rise in American companies purchasing foreign steel. That led to a job where he was taught how to teach welding when his uncle told him about an open position at a steel company in Coatesville.
“I went for the interview and the technical director looked at me and he said, ‘You have the skills we need but you’re not a teacher.’ He said, ‘I know how to teach. I’ll coach you on how to teach if you’ll take the job and we’ll see how it goes.’” said Johnson. “Lo and behold I started learning what it’s like to have to communicate what I know and I knew my trade really well but I never taught before. He coached me on that and I immediately began to see how fun it was to help someone else learn, you know, to go from this level to this level. And with my teaching them how to weld and bringing their skills up, it was very satisfying to me. And that was the very beginning of what would become my teaching career.”
He said that experience is when he fell in love with teaching, so he decided to attend Millersville University to obtain his teaching degree. While there, he met people whose faith led him to commit his life to Christ.
In addition to his love of the Lord and teaching, there’s wife Diana, who helps him run his business called Iron Nature, which he describes as a true “mom and pop shop.” They have displayed their faith-based metal works at the Lebanon Area Fair and at Creation Festival, an spiritual gathering featuring Christian music that used to be held annually at Agape Farm in Huntingdon County.
Johnson loves opportunities like Creation because he has the best of all possible worlds as he gets to teach others about his craft during metal working demonstrations at these events.
One year at Creation, however, was unlike the others.
He said he met a teenager whose heart he touched like the metal he heats then molds into shape. In this case, another kind of molding would happen that would have a profound effect on this young person’s life.
Johnson said the teen kept coming back again and again to watch his demonstrations and was enthralled with what he saw. Later, after the event had ended, Johnson said he was back home a few weeks later when the Spirit led him to create a cross for this young man.
With tears streaming down his face and several pauses in his story to clear his throat, Johnson explained what happened next.
“I’m out working in my shop a couple weeks later building some pieces, and I had this idea, this premonition came to me. I said, ‘Build a cross for this kid. Build him a cross.’ I didn’t think anything of it other than, you know, I remembered him being there talking to me. I remember how passionate he was about it.”
So Johnson built a cross and mailed it to him.
“I didn’t hear anything from him for the whole year. It wasn’t until we went back the second year to Creation and his stepdad came up to me at the booth. He said, ‘I want to tell you a story,’” recalled Johnson. “He said, ‘My son’s been having a lot of problems and he was up in his room the day the cross arrived. He came down to me and he said, ‘I’m not going to do it.’ I had put a letter in the cross and wrote, ‘Jason, whatever you do in your life, just put Jesus first.’ That’s all. He came down to his dad and he said, ‘I was about to take my life.’ He confessed to his dad, you know, all these things that were going on in his life. He became a believer.”
It’s moments like those that make his metal works worthwhile for Johnson.
“The intersection of doing this as a ministry has really been super exciting. I mean I can’t say the number of stories that we’ve encountered as part of the ministry of the artwork,” said Johnson. “Just things that you would have never dreamed could ever happen, have happened because of walking down this road of doing the artwork. So it’s been very exciting and I’m thankful for the opportunity to do it.”
Johnson is grateful for how the Lord has led his life to this point in time.
“Like I said to you before, it was never anything on my scope. If you’d asked me if I was going to be doing this, I’d say, ‘No way.’ But having discovered that and seeing now how exciting it is has really energized my retirement. I mean, I left (retired from) teaching and now I’m doing this full-time. It’s kind of switching gears again, but it’s fun. I enjoy it.”
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