“All of our cast and crew who live out there are safe,” said Jenkins. “A lot of them have been evacuated.” While a few have lost their homes, the majority of the cast and crew haven’t, and no one is dead or injured. “Everyone is safe,” Jenkins reiterated, adding, “We of course appreciate your prayers for those who are displaced.”
Jenkins explained that his co-writers on “The Chosen,” Ryan Swanson and Tyler Thompson, were with him this week and that the three had been “really digging in and working hard on the scripts for Season 6, particularly the Season 6 finale, which is the crucifixion and is going to be a big feature film. And so we’re really digging in there.”
The writers were focused on their work and consequently “off-grid,” so they were not at first aware of the severity of the wildfires. But then they began receiving numerous messages from people and realized how “horrifying” the situation was.
Thompson, whose house survived, has been displaced. Jenkins also shared that the head writer on the forthcoming Joseph miniseries had the only surviving house in the writer’s neighborhood.
“That brings up the kinds of questions that we’re bringing up, where you go, ‘Why me and not others?’” Jenkins said. “It’s easy to say, ‘Thank God,’ right? ‘Thank God that you spared me.’” However, “the person whose house was burned down has a justifiable question: ‘So wait, God spared you and not me? Why?’”
“These are important questions, and it’s one of the reasons why in ‘The Chosen,’ we have leaned into that question quite a lot. More so than typical,” Jenkins explained. “Because when Jesus was on earth, he healed so many people, and yet, clearly, in the course of the Bible, in the course of history, God—and these are even in Bible verses—would spare some and not others, and that is still the case today.”
Jenkins mentioned examples of unexplained suffering depicted in “The Chosen,” such as the death of Ramah, Eden’s miscarriage, and Little James’ disability, which Jesus does not heal.
“Some people die when others don’t. Some people are healed when others aren’t. Some people experience trials when others don’t,” Jenkins said. “And there seems to be no rhyme or reason to it. And one of the things that I think we have to face and acknowledge is that we don’t always know.”
Why did the writer’s house survive alone out of anyone else’s in that neighborhood? “We don’t know,” Jenkins said. “God is on a different economy of time and space and sees the full picture that we don’t see, and this is where faith comes in sometimes.”
During such tragic circumstances, it is easy for people to ask themselves, “Am I believing in a God who feels random like this, that would just allow some of this to happen?”
