Bethany Chastain

From a young age I was drawn to everything theatrical: costumes, stories, sets, music, props, everything. Something at the theatre felt alive and real and beautiful…and I wanted it.

I received a music degree from Wheaton College in IL with an emphasis in Vocal Performance in 2011 and launched straight into pursuing a professional musical theatre career in Chicago and then Minneapolis.

God, however, had a very different plan for my life…

When I married my incredible husband in 2012, we quickly became parents and I sensed Jesus asking me to bury the seed of theatre in the ground and water it with my tears. I was obedient, crying many tears as I let go of “the dream.” I continued to do some commercial work and progressively became disillusioned by the hamster wheel of it all: audition, audition, audition, book a gig, lather, rinse, repeat…an endless parade of asking permission to tell stories that I didn’t care about and, once in a while, being chosen.

When I finally let the seed fall to the ground and fully die, it stayed dead for a long time and now, a decade later, it is beginning to sprout to life.

Over the years I have now lived the beauty of God’s story: through my marriage and through the birth of our four amazing children. Telling the Story of God now is like icing on the cake. Jesus is the culmination of every alive and beautiful and real thing I went to the theatre to experience.

To have the privilege of telling HIS Story theatrically—at this stage of my life—is as unbelievable to me as a seed becoming a plant. The miracle will forever be a mystery to me.

“Truly, truly, I say to you,unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”

John 12:24