An INNER VIEW with Music Agent, Megan Feveryear
Bio
Megan is an Artist Manager for Long Run Media and Management. She hails from Lancaster, PA, and has been a Nashville native for almost 4 years. Along with being an artist manager in the music industry, you can catch Megan as the host of two podcasts! The This Day Podcast and the Consider the Lilies Podcast. Both encourage individuals to go and pursue all that God has called them to do! When Megan is not working, she leads a small group, spends time with her family, or plans her next trip (her goal is to see the world).
INNER VIEW
Kathleen Cooke: You are juggling lots of work in PR and marketing of musical artists – growing their careers. What’s the one thing God has been teaching you and growing you in right now?
Megan Feveryear: God has taught me so much lately about trusting His timing, believing for the impossible, and remembering He is God. Between all those truths, I have been knocked to my knees several times, reminded of who God is and who I am not. So often in the career space, I feel like I need to be the one with the death grip of control on the wheel, and if I don’t have control, then something must be wrong. But after a recent major career shift, God has been telling me to look forward to Him without looking at everyone around me. It’s such an important concept when we genuinely think about it.
We are all in a race – the race of life. Many times, people will be running faster than us. In the music industry, I continually see artists wanting to be like this person or that person because they have more followers on social media when the truth of the matter is that having followers and a platform is great, but as you go deeper with people, you find they are just people. Their 100K followers mean nothing if, underneath the surface, they are struggling with the same thing you are struggling with. It becomes up to us to determine if we will strive and strain to keep up or fix our eyes and look toward the goal of Christ in our careers.
Kathleen: What do you wish you’d learned early in your career that you now know?
Megan: Take what people say with a grain of salt. So many people want to offer you what they believe is good advice. And some advice is wise and filled with truth. But ultimately, words can hurt if not appropriately stewarded. While working in the music industry, I have had life-giving words spoken into my story, and then I have had more hurtful words spoken to me than I could have ever imagined. I have come to understand what Proverbs 18:21 says, “our tongue has the power of life and death.” It holds more power than we truly know. I wish I had learned sooner that what people say does not have power over me. I am who I am because God has called me and commissioned me to do his work, not because someone down the road called me, but because the One who created me called me. The moment you “shake the hate” of damaging words is when you truly live in the complete freedom that Christ has set apart for you. That is the lesson I wish I had grasped sooner. It is something that I am still working always to remember. When people say words that hurt you, remember that we live in a fallen world broken thousands of years ago. As believers, we must carry the light and be the difference for others to see.
Kathleen: What do you do when it seems God is silent and you can’t connect to Him?
Megan: This is a big one for me. Even as I was writing this and thinking about participating in this project, God was particularly silent. My career was at an all-time high, and I was riding the wave of getting to know everyone I could meet. It felt like I was living my best life, but in my heart, God was so far away. I have a prayer closet in my actual closet in my home. During that season, I could not even pray in that closet because I could cut the fissure in my relationship with God like a knife. I could feel it with my entire spirit. That’s when I heard a song that broke me one night, “Better” by Pat Barrett, which says, “All the money that the world could hold, God, you are better than anything.” I knew God’s silence was partly on me. So, I started doing the next right thing. I started reading a Psalm each night, journaling my prayers, asking questions of God, and taking one step after another. One night, I went back into my prayer closet, read a Psalm of David out loud, and shouted it to God – literally yelling at God and asking, “Why He was so silent.” That night, God broke me. And the silence broke. So, when God seems silent, I find it is our time to ask Him difficult questions. He wants our “whys.” He wants our questions. Bring them to Him. Yell if you must!
Kathleen: Has there been someone in your life who has influenced you and changed the direction you were going?
Megan: High school was a pivotal time for me. I was trying to decide what I wanted to do with my life before and after college. I had two significant influences in my life. My youth pastor, Darin Parry, and a Christian artist and musician friend I looked up to named Greg Ritchie. During my high school senior year, I was an intern at my small-town church. Pastor Darin was helping me navigate decision after decision. I had registered and signed on with Liberty University to become a ministry major and a youth pastor with a women’s ministry minor when Greg Ritchie entered my life. He was a good family friend, and we had started talking about the music industry. I assisted on a few tour dates selling “merch” for the Gaither Tour and found that I loved it. So, two months before I left for college, I sent a rogue email to Greg and said, “I don’t know if this makes any sense, but I feel in my spirit that God wants me to do something in the music industry, but I can’t sing. I think He wants me to do what you do.” I got zero response. We were at an event together two weeks after that email, and he pulled me aside and talked for an hour. That was Memorial Day weekend in 2017. I changed my major from ministry to marketing, all because of a guy named Greg and seeing how he loved and lived on tour. Darin has continued to be a constant influence in my corner, reminding me often that even on my darkest days, the same God who changed my major at the last minute is the same God who has BIG things in store for me and that my future is yet to come.