The following is excerpted from the Deseret News. To read the full article, CLICK HERE. 

The year was 2017 and Dallas Jenkins really thought he had made it. A wrestling company, a horror film company and an Illinois church came together to make “The Resurrection of Gavin Stone,” a Christian comedy drama.

But then on Jan. 20, the box-office numbers began rolling in and as Jenkins told it — it was a failure. Speaking to just over 8,000 attendees at Brigham Young University as the forum speaker, Jenkins told “a story rooted in failure.” And yet it was ultimately a story rooted in faith.

Jenkins, the creator of the hit show “The Chosen,” said the advice he’d give — about learning to surrender to God’s will instead of caring about what other people think — is what he wished he had been told when he was in college.

A warm welcome

The Marriott Center was packed as members of the campus community and visitors filled their seats to hear from Jenkins. You could spot the occasional “The Chosen” shirt or hat in the audience.

“You’ve been coming to my house for 40 years, two by two,” joked Jenkins in an implicit reference to Latter-day Saint missionaries (he is an evangelical). “It’s about time I come to your house.”

Jenkins said he knows college students face a lot of pressure and stress to figure out their lives. He said it wasn’t until his 40s he learned how to break free from some of that stress, calling it “an idol that needs to be broken.”

He wanted to be taken seriously, Jenkins recalled.

From the time Jenkins made his first feature film (”Midnight Clear”) at 25 years old, Jenkins said his goal and passion was legitimacy.

“You see, in my business, you’re measured not necessarily by how good you are at your job, but you’re measured by how successful you are — how others think you’re good or not,” said Jenkins.

At the onset of his film career, he worked for a company making movies based on his dad Jerry Jenkins’ books (Jerry is the author of the “Left Behind” series). He made several other independent films and dreamed of a certain kind of success.

“I used to practice Academy Award speeches in front of my mirror,” said Jenkins. “I’d like to say that ended when I was a teenager, but it kept going into my 20s.” The glitz and glamour of Hollywood awards wasn’t all that attracted him. He said he wanted a big platform because he wanted to be a voice for God — but he was really excited by the prospect of finishing at the top of the box office.

After living in Los Angeles for a decade, the Jenkins family moved back to Illinois and worked for a large church in the Chicago area. The church had the kind of resources to make films, but he didn’t immediately do that.

To read the full article, CLICK HERE.