On Friday night, Megan spoke at 72 — Beyond’s ministry expression for students and young adults — inviting a generation shaped by comparison and uncertainty to consider a defining question: What is worth your whole life?
The question emerged from Jesus’ parable in Matthew 13:44, in which a man discovers treasure hidden in a field. Recognising its value, he sells everything he owns and buys the land.
His surrender is not reluctant. He has found something worth more.
That discovery became the central challenge of the evening. What have we decided is worthy of our time, attention and devotion? On what are we spending the one life we have been given?
SOMETHING WORTH MORE
Megan connected the parable to the meaning behind the name 72. In Luke 10, Jesus does not reserve His mission for the 12 apostles. He appoints and sends out 72 disciples, multiplying the number of ordinary people who will carry His presence into the surrounding towns.
The number reflects a faith that moves. Ordinary people encounter Jesus and then carry the news of His kingdom beyond the walls of a gathering.
But before the 72 could go, they first had to understand what they had found. The kingdom of God could not remain one interest among many. It had to become the treasure by which everything else was valued.
“Some of us sell our lives to things that are of momentary satisfaction,” Megan said. “Some of us invest into people and things that can replace us tomorrow.”
A life is rarely surrendered all at once. More often, it is spent in small installments on things that cannot carry its weight: peace exchanged for approval, purpose for popularity and identity for acceptance.
Careers can replace us. Approval can move elsewhere. Relationships can become substitutes for identity. Even ambition, useful in its proper place, can quietly become a master.
Against that pattern, Megan offered a different understanding of surrender.
“We don’t surrender because Jesus takes something from us,” she said. “When we surrender, He gives everything back to us.”
Surrender to God is not the disappearance of the self, but its recovery. Jesus does not ask people to become less fully themselves. He frees them from the counterfeit identities they have been trying to maintain.
THE COST OF LOOKING SIDEWAYS
That freedom matters acutely for students and young adults. These years are crowded with consequential questions: Which direction should I take? Is this relationship right? What will I do after graduation? Where will the next opportunity come from? Am I falling behind?
Around those questions hum the constant signals of social media, achievement and other people’s carefully edited lives.
In seasons of uncertainty, somebody else’s apparent clarity can begin to look like a map. But comparison does not provide direction. It creates disorientation.
“Comparison is a thief of joy,” Megan told the room.
It does more than produce dissatisfaction. It distorts identity, persuading people that they are late, lacking or misplaced simply because somebody else’s life appears to be moving differently.
“Comparison is chasing,” she said. “Comparison is wanting what somebody else has, not realising that God placed you exactly where you need to be.”
Drawing from Galatians 6:4–5, Megan urged the room to examine their own actions without measuring themselves against anyone else. Each person has a load to carry — a particular life, calling and measure of responsibility entrusted to them by God.
That load is not evidence of divine neglect. It is a particular stewardship, shaped for one person’s shoulders.
Sometimes carrying it means forgiving when retaliation feels justified. Sometimes it means walking away from something others dismiss as harmless. Sometimes it means choosing integrity when compromise would be easier and less visible.
The question is not whether another person’s life appears lighter. It is whether we will faithfully carry the life God has placed in our own hands.
Faithfulness is not about winning somebody else’s race. It is about learning to recognise — and remain in — your own lane.
KNOWN BY NAME
The message became most arresting when Megan moved from principle to testimony.
She spoke candidly about an abusive relationship during her early high-school years, recalling how she once believed that being mistreated and spoken to cruelly was somehow normal. Looking back, she described a God who saw her when she felt unseen — a God who gathered the pieces of her life, opened another way and taught her that she was worth more.
Suddenly, the treasure in the field was no longer an abstract theological idea.
It was rescue.
Megan also recalled the uncertainty surrounding her graduation and the fear that she might not be able to walk across the stage. Her testimony revealed a God who met her when she could not make a way for herself — the God who could do what no person or human system could do.
“I would choose this life over and over again,” she said.
Not because following Jesus had eliminated hardship, but because she had discovered the treasure in the field: the God who sees, restores and remembers.
Her gratitude carried the force of someone who knows what it means to be found.
Comparison thrives where identity is uncertain. It becomes easier to compromise when nobody seems to know your name — and easier to perform when everybody does.
But God knows each person by name.
To be known by God changes the terms of the conversation. A closed door no longer has to mean that He has ceased to be good. An uncertain season does not mean He has misplaced us. Another person’s progress is not evidence of our failure.
Those who know they are known no longer need to construct an identity from other people’s lives.
ENCOUNTERING JESUS AGAIN
The man in Jesus’ parable did not sell everything because the field was empty. He sold everything because it contained treasure.
Christian surrender begins not with deprivation, but with sight.
Once the worth of Jesus is seen, the things that once demanded everything begin to lose their claim.
That is why Megan resisted the idea that her task was simply to persuade the room to try harder.
“I don’t want to convince you to love Jesus more,” she said. “I want to encourage you to encounter Him again.”
Effort alone cannot cure comparison. Neither can a perfectly mapped-out future. What changes a life is the discovery that God knows it completely: every wound, every closed door, every unanswered question and every name.
“You don’t have to have your whole life figured out to give God your whole life,” Megan said.
Faith is not the reward for finally achieving certainty. It is the decision to trust God before the complete picture has emerged. Sometimes its most honest prayer is simply, “Lord, I don’t know, but You do.”
For 72, that trust is inseparable from its calling. The disciples in Luke’s Gospel were not sent because they had resolved every uncertainty. They were sent because they had encountered the kingdom and could no longer keep its news to themselves.
The same invitation now rests with a new generation.
THIS LIFE HAS NO REPLAY
The evening did not end with a formula for securing the perfect career, relationship or five-year plan. It offered something more durable: an invitation to move with Jesus even when the answers remain incomplete.
Comparison asks, “Why is their life not mine?”
Faith asks, “What has God placed in my hands?”
One question drains joy and fractures identity. The other opens a life to obedience, purpose and freedom.
This life comes only once. It cannot be replayed, and the time spent imitating somebody else’s calling cannot be recovered. The answer is not passivity or the abandonment of ambition. It is consecration — the decision that nothing will matter more than the will of God.
For the generation gathered at 72, the call was both personal and expansive:
Stop spending a singular life trying to become somebody else. Stop mistaking comparison for direction or compromise for freedom.
Buy the field. Receive the treasure. Carry the life God has placed in your hands.
Jesus is still worth everything. And the one life God has entrusted to you is the one you were called to live.
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