“God bless that show,” said Janko.
A few minutes later, Shawna returned to the topic of “The Chosen” and mentioned the episode where Jesus meets Nathanael. “When Nathanael walked up to Jesus, Jesus just looked at him and he was so honest, right?” she said. “He told him exactly what he’d been going through. He’s like, ‘I know everything about you. This is what you’ve been saying, what you’ve been feeling. This is what you’ve been doing. I was there with you.’”
Jesus was more direct with Nathanael than with the other disciples, said Shawna. “I don’t know if I’m wrong about this, but it’s almost like he saw his faith, right?” she said. “He saw Nathanael’s faith in God.”
“And because he had the ears and the heart to hear it, then God revealed to him more than he ever did to his disciples,” Shawna said, “because his disciples still have that walk of strengthening their faith so that they have the ears to be able to hear it and receive it and fully understand it.”
“I cried my eyes out in that moment,” Wahlberg told her. “I think in that moment, I mean…he told him what he said under that tree, right?”
“It’s also, like, again, that vulnerability. It’s like, today I had a talk with myself similar to what you’re talking about with Nathanael,” said Wahlberg. “David cried out and cried out and cried out in Psalms, like he [was] just crying out, in Job, and all these things.”
Then Wahlberg realized, referring to himself, “Bro you can’t cry out. You can’t cry out, like, you’re too good to cry out. You don’t want him to know this vulnerable side of you. Like, what are you thinking? What are you thinking?”
Wahlberg shared with the Jankos at length about how he is learning to be vulnerable with God and how he came to a point where he knew he needed to fully surrender his life to Christ. “It’s been an on and off journey my whole life,” he said. “And it’s really in the last year that I really have committed myself on a deeper level.”
