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By Brianne Cascanette
Everything is, in fact, not fine.
It’s a simple sentence. Almost blunt in its honesty. And yet it lands with a quiet force most of us aren’t used to naming out loud—to ourselves or to others.
How often do we default to saying “I’m fine” or “all is well” when someone takes time to ask us how we are doing? These phrases roll off the tongue so easily and so often that they barely have time to register as untrue. We say them out of habit, politeness, or even from a place of self-preservation. Meanwhile, beneath the surface, something in us still aches. Something feels unsettled. Something is, in fact, not well—in body, in mind, in spirit, or in that tangled place where all three meet.
And if you need to hear it from someone today: you’re not the only one who feels that way. Maybe that’s why hearing those words spoken aloud matters so much.
This past weekend, on March 21st, keynote speaker Colm Leyne spoke them plainly during the MyGen youth rally: everything is, in fact, not fine. The goal? For everyone gathered—youth, young adults, leaders, ministry teams, teachers—to hear those words and be reminded that life does, in fact, get hard sometimes. Not everything is easy. Not everything feels joy-filled or straightforward. Some days, we feel like we are thriving, and the next day, we are just focused on surviving.
As someone serving at MyGen this past weekend, and having the privilege of seeing students’ written prayer requests while also praying with them for their specific needs, I can guarantee you: our young people are already recognizing day-to-day challenges and feeling the weight of pain, grief, and loss. They grapple with hard questions, searching for answers and hoping for a sliver of reassurance, and hope that the community around them will support them as they grow. It is our responsibility, and our privilege, to sit with our young people and let them feel the freedom of admitting that not everything is “fine”. We can meet them in grace, with hope, and through prayer.
For me, sitting there, hearing these words as a young adult volunteer and leader, something finally exhaled inside me. Not because it was new information—but because it was permission. Permission to stop performing. Permission to loosen the grip of always needing to be “on”, composed, put together. Permission to be honest—with myself and with others.
From that place, Leyne offered the audience three simple but profound questions—not as quick fixes, but as anchors, helping us examine our story so far:
Where are you coming from?
Not the surface-level answer. The real one. What joys, grief, quiet disappointments, hard-won victories, or aching losses are you carrying into this moment?
What are you receiving?
Are you open—to Truth, to grace, to the possibility that you are loved and seen just as you are? Or are you feeling too guarded or weary to take anything in?
Where are you going?
Perhaps the hardest one: what comes next? Not in some abstract five-year-plan way—but in the small, concrete choices. What will you do with your life, your story, your fear? What courage are you still withholding?
If we take these questions and sit with them—especially now, in the final days of Lent as we move into the weight of Holy Week—what might we uncover? About ourselves, about our story, and about the quiet ways our story intersects with the lives of others?
Because when you stop for a moment, you will realize that Lent is a small word for a season that asks a lot.
It invites us—if we let it—to look a little closer, to strip things back, to notice what we usually keep buffered by noise, distraction, or routine. Not dramatically, but in the ordinary, uncomfortable spaces we tend to avoid.
For me, that started with music.
I love music. It’s how I process—thoughts, emotions, experiences. It helps me make sense of things that don’t always come together easily on their own. But, if I’m honest, it’s also been a way to avoid silence.
Because silence, for me, has never just been about the absence of sound. It feels more like absence in general—a lack of presence, a lack of place. And I don’t sit well in that.
So I learned to fill it.
Sometimes with full-volume distraction. Sometimes just a low, steady hum—enough to take the edge off, enough to keep certain thoughts at a distance. It worked… until it didn’t. Because when the noise drops out, what rises are the things I’ve spent a long time trying not to face.
Going into this Lenten season, I realized this was where I was being asked to change something.
Not forever. Just long enough to notice where I wasn’t leaving space for God, for prayer, for reflection.
To just sit without distraction sometimes. To let my thoughts surface and actually stay long enough to examine them. To be still—even when it feels unnatural—and resist the urge to immediately fill the space.
Not as a punishment, and not as something performative. But to make space—for something deeper. For Someone.
So I cleared things out. Not all music, but enough to feel the absence of it. I became more intentional—what I listened to, when I listened, and why.
Almost immediately, it got uncomfortable.
A couple of days in, though, something unexpected happened. I stumbled across—or rather, was recommended—a song I hadn’t listened to in probably a decade. One that underscored a whole stretch of my youth.
In the middle of this quieter, more intentional listening, an old song surfaced again—Carry On by Fun. Recognizing the title, I clicked it and let it play in the background as I continued the work in front of me.
Several years ago, it was just that—an anthem. Something my peers and I played loudly or turned up on the radio, something you felt without really stepping back and examining its meaning. Back then, I vibed with the sound and energy of it.
Now, several years later, in a very different season of life, it lands differently.
Now, it’s both—the sound and the weight of the lyrics. And somewhere along the way, it started to feel less like background noise and more like a mirror.
Because “carry on” sounds simple. Until you’re the one who has to do it.
“On our darkest day, when we’re miles away… we will come, we will find our way home.”
Lent can feel like those lyrics at times—like being miles away. From who you thought you’d be. From where you thought you’d be. From clarity, from certainty—sometimes even from God. And still, there’s this quiet insistence: keep going, and carry on.
It’s not lost on me that all of this echoes Carry On—not just as a song, but as a kind of quiet anthem for what it means to keep moving forward. Not dramatically, not perfectly, maybe not even steadily. Just one step at a time, sometimes heavy, sometimes uncertain, but still forward.
We’re nearing the end of Lent now. The long stretch of waiting, of reflection, of sitting with what is unfinished or uncomfortable. Slowly, we move toward Easter—the light, the promise of something made new.
But “carrying on” in this season isn’t about grinning and bearing things or proving your own strength to others. Carrying on is not stoicism dressed up as faith, or independence pretending to be resilience. It is something quieter and harder: trusting that you don’t have to hold everything together on your own, and that, really, you can’t.
Because at the center of this story is not our effort, but Christ—arms outstretched, body broken, love poured out without reserve.
So we carry on. Not because everything is fine. Not because we have it all figured out. But because even the pieces of our lives that feel like too much—the breaking points, the last straws—are not wasted when we choose to receive God’s love and grace. When we leave ourselves open to Truth.
Seen in the light of the resurrection, our doubts and fears, failures and sorrows become something else entirely. Not erased, not minimized—but gathered, reworked, made into something that can heal.
Piece by piece. Step by step. We carry on. And our story is still a work in progress. Those around us carry on, too—each with quiet victories, losses, and disappointments.
So, as we move into Holy Week, let us not be so quick to default to “all is fine,” either in our own lives or when hearing it from friends and family. Let us meet one another—young and old—where we are in this Lenten season, and even in the weeks to come. Let us bear witness to one another’s struggles and triumphs, and encourage each other to carry on towards the promise of the Resurrection.
