Dallas Jenkins, creator of the hit show The Chosen, spoke at a Brigham Young University devotional on October 29. I listened to a recording of his talk, and an idea he presented is not going to be leaving my mind (or heart) anytime soon: God does impossible math.
Before I lose you, rest assured Dallas wasn’t talking about calculus class. He was talking about what happens when you give yourself over to God.
Dallas Shares His Greatest Failure
Dallas said that earlier in his career, he wanted to achieve the fame and glamour of Hollywood and direct movies that finished at the top of the box office. For years, he worked on smaller independent films, but in 2017, an opportunity finally arose to work with major Hollywood companies and make the type of big movie he’d always wanted. “I had arrived,” Dallas remembers thinking.
But when the movie was released to the public, the box-office numbers tanked.
“Within two hours, I went from being a director with a very bright future to being a director with no future,” he said.
Dallas and his wife, Amanda, were distraught. As they sat at home in tears, Amanda felt impressed that her husband needed to read the New Testament story of Jesus feeding the 5,000—and she felt God telling her, “I do impossible math.”
At first, Dallas thought maybe that meant the movie’s numbers would turn around. But they got worse. So Dallas stayed up late writing a memo, trying to figure out what had gone wrong with the movie. Then, to his total surprise, an acquaintance randomly sent him this message at 4 a.m.: “Remember it’s not your job to feed the 5,000. It’s only to provide the loaves and fish.”
Dallas says that moment changed his life.
“In that moment, I knew God was present. I knew that God was looking over this. I knew that God had indeed, probably, brought me to that place of failure, and He did indeed have something in it for me. …
“And I wasn’t going to be able to solve this or figure this out on my own. I still didn’t know what impossible math meant in this case because success wasn’t on the horizon. But in that moment, all I cared about was God’s will. And so I surrendered. Probably for the first time in my life.”
The Chosen Is Born
After that, Dallas produced a short film about the birth of the Savior from the perspective of the shepherds. Compared to the scale of production of his last movie, this short film “felt like a significant step down.”
“It didn’t even feel like five loaves and two fishes; it felt like one loaf and half a fish,” Dallas says. But on the other hand, Dallas had never felt more in his zone.
“Everything was feeling natural and right,” he says. “In this short film about the birth of Christ, I feel like I’m learning more and engaged more in this story than I ever have. Even just by telling it, I feel like it’s coming alive to me more than ever.”
From that feeling, Dallas came up with the idea for The Chosen. But he had no way to bring the artistic portrayal he imagined of Jesus and His followers to life.
Long story short, however, the short film Dallas made was seen by Angel Studios (then called VidAngel) in Provo, Utah. The company loved it. They also heard Dallas’s idea for The Chosen and wanted to do it. But they hoped to fund the series via crowdfunding—and Dallas was not optimistic.
“Crowdfunding rarely works,” he says. But he again thought of the story of the loaves and fishes—and decided to try.
“And something special happened,” he says. “I’m sitting at the computer, and my wife is next to me, and we pass the 10 million mark, shattering the all-time crowdfunding record by 16 thousand. …
“I hear my wife sniffling, and I look over and she’s got tears coming down her face, and she says, ‘I do impossible math!’ Just as clearly as [God had] said it to her the year before, He said it again.
“In that moment, it was very easy to realize … this is impossible math. This is the kind of math that God’s part of, not the math equation based on numbers and interest. This is what He does: He takes the small, the broken, the surrender, and makes something out of it.”
Dallas Jenkins received a standing ovation for his remarks. You can listen to the full BYU devotional on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.
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