It Cannot Always Be Night
Making peace with NIGHT so I can welcome DAY.
“You look happier”. I glanced down at my cup, swirling the coffee around in a gentle circle as my mind flashed back through past few years of my life. “Yeah, I think I am” I replied.
I heard the same phrase multiple times on my brief visit to Los Angeles. I returned for a song-writing camp, one I’ve had the privilege of participating in three times now. Each time I try and stay a little longer, to catch up with friends in the area. I feel like there’s a certain perspective people get when they see you just once every 6 months or so. Unlike the friends who see all the little steps of my journey, these friends see the bigger strides from afar.
And almost everyone I had the chance to spend more time with told me I seemed happier, lighter, more at-ease. I felt it in myself too, and I knew it came from more than just the much-needed Vitamin D of California sunshine, after long cold winter months in the UK… Even after returning home to my friends and family, it was nice to hear the same thing from them, “you seem happy”.
There were days I thought I’d never feel that way. The last few years have honestly been the craziest journey of my life, marked by grief, loss, doubt (someday I’ll share the full story). At my lowest moments it seemed this would just be a downward slope with no light at the end of the tunnel.
I’ve written about some of that here on my page. I processed through conversations, through journaling, therapy, poetry and songwriting. Music has always been my main way of expressing the language of my heart and emotions - so I wrote, and wrote and wrote.
The songs that came out were some of the most vulnerable and painfully honest I’d written, and I just kept them building up on my hard-drive, some of them are still there and I may not ever share them. The rest became an album I released in September called “NIGHT”.
That album really took a lot out of me, emotionally and physically. It’s the only time I’ve ever cried after finishing the final mix and sending a project to mastering. It just meant so much to me. Although it was difficult to make, I felt that I had fittingly honoured my feelings and the people I had loved and lost. For somebody who grew up learning to stuff my feelings deep down and not give them much time of day, it was a cathartic and healing experience.
I called the album “NIGHT” because of a description of the night that I read in John O’Donaghue’s book “Anam Cara” - he described the night time as a healing time, when we come home, we rest, we close the door to the outside and shelter ourselves in hiddenness. It encapsulated my experience when I wanted to disappear from the world and when, quite frankly, it became necessary to face and address the things within myself that I had long tried to avoid.
I know the album was not the kind of project that would have mass appeal and be everyone’s favourite of mine, but it was for the people who needed it. For those going through their own grief or pain, it was a bridge, an embrace.
What I didn’t share at the time was that I was also making a second album, called “DAY”. Originally I had planned to release both of them just a week apart, a surprise drop with even more songs to digest (a sort of contemplative cousin of Justin Bieber’s SWAG and SWAG 2, if you will). But as I started to put the songs into different folders and figure out the release strategy, I realised that I needed to give this second album some more time.
Truthfully, I didn’t even feel like I wanted to release a “DAY” album while I was feeling the way I was. “Who am I kidding?” I thought to myself, trying to make this happy, upbeat while trying to get through depression. I felt that I was almost prophetically making the album. I was writing songs that one day I want to sing, even if I can’t sing them right now.
Every now and then the line from Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem, famously sampled in the song “Praise God”, would come to mind:
“Even if you are not ready for the day, it cannot always be night”.
And I just had to hold on to the hope that I won’t always feel the way I’m feeling in this moment. Grief is really hard, and really intense, but it does pass. I’ve been through it before and I know that, while a part of you is irreversibly changed and marked by the experience, the intensity of it does subside with time.
I had to keep believing that, just like the rhythm of our natural world, night will always give way to day. And sure enough, it did.
I think touring the NIGHT album was the experience that helped me start to glimpse the light creeping up over the horizon. I remember finishing the production of NIGHT and thinking “well, the album is done, but my grief isn’t”. I didn’t know if I would be able to move on from it. But being able to share the songs in person, in small intimate rooms with other humans, helped to broaden my horizons. I’d spent a lot of time on the internal world, I’d done a lot of processing, a lot of figuring out, a lot of introspection. That was good, it was necessary, I was able to pin-point and uproot some really negative things that never belonged there, but that process wasn’t meant to last forever. At the end of these concerts I found myself meeting people who shared their own stories with me, their own losses. I’m still so moved thinking about the people I met and the experiences they were kind of enough to share with me. I felt my heart go out to these people and their pain.
I had long conversations on car rides with my friends and heard their experiences of going through similar things and I felt the small, quiet invitation to step out of the internal world and into the outside world where I began to realise I’m not as alone as I had first thought.
I had put this pressure on the idea of facing the day to be the moment I have all the answers, that all my struggles are gone, that I’m not feeling grief anymore. But that’s not what the day is about. It’s about realising that there comes a time to step out again and look beyond yourself and your circumstances. It’s about trying your best just to keep going and realise you were never meant to do this alone.
To be honest with you, I don’t have the answers I was looking for in my introspective era. I just knew it was time to make peace with the fact that I’m still allowed to keep moving regardless, and that sometimes healing means taking one step at a time in the direction you want to be going.
I met a friend, who also happens to a pastor, for coffee several months ago. I was in the middle of my spiralling thoughts and my worldview falling to pieces around me. After a friendly catch up and some light banter, my inner monologue spilled out and I made a sudden pivot into the existential. “Is God really good?” I asked. “It just seems like everyone I know that’s trying to follow him is having a really hard time. Nobody seems happy. It seems like they all talk about being ‘tested’ by God or that he’s challenging them to do all of these difficult things and make huge sacrifices, meanwhile my non-Christian friends are living a simple life and seem to be doing just fine. What’s that about?”
She probed a little deeper, reminding me that she is actually enjoying her life in God, and so are many others, and that I have just been through a uniquely intense period of life which might be warping my perspective just a little, and that life can’t be all that bad given that we’re sitting in a really beautifully designed coffee shop sipping £5 matcha lattes. As I started to rant about suffering and how God seems to remain silent, and all the stories through the Old Testament where God just seemed cruel and unkind, and on and on… she asked me “have you read Psalm 73”?
I was pretty familiar with the psalms but I couldn’t recall that one in the moment. I opened up my Bible app and started to give it a quick read through. Have you ever had that moment where you realise you’ve never had an original thought? Yeah. That’s what happened.
“Truly God is good to Israel, to those whose hearts are pure.” it started.
“Sure.” I thought. “I tried for years to keep my heart pure and look where I am now…”
“But as for me, I almost lost my footing. My feet were slipping, and I was almost gone.” it continues in verse 2.
“Ok yep. Same same. I was so ready to call it quits just a few weeks ago. I guess my feet have been slipping for a while.”
“For I envied the proud when I saw them prosper despite their wickedness. They seem to live such painless lives; their bodies are so healthy and strong. They don’t have troubles like other people; they’re not plagued with problems like everyone else.”
“Yes, exactly!” I began to realise I was relating a little too much to this psalm. I thought about all the random guys I see on TikTok and Threads posting their photo dumps showing off their amazing outfits, their beautiful home, their abs, their relationship, their peaceful life, while I lay in bed battling depressive thoughts and wondering if everything I’d believed was even real.
“Look at these people, enjoying a life of ease while their riches multiply.”
I nodded. Yeah! Exactly!
“Did I keep my heart pure for nothing? Did I keep myself innocent for no reason? I get nothing but trouble all day long; every morning brings me pain.”
Ok, wait. Now I feel like Asaph is reading my journal. I literally had that thought moments ago. I realised it was maybe the root of the feelings I’d been having. I always thought of myself as the good church kid, the pastor’s kid. I kept myself out of trouble. I did all the right things. I said the right things, I performed as best as I could. But look where it led me and look how I’m feeling now, dealing with so much shame and self-rejection while people seem to be living with such ease all around me in this city, with no concern for whether they’re doing what’s “right”.
“But when I thought how to understand this, it seemed to me a wearisome task”
You can say that again, Asaph. This was exactly how I felt. Years of ‘processing’, of ‘figuring it out’. I remember telling friends “I just need to understand WHY, and then I can move forward”. I was desperate for answers and it was tiring me out, physically, mentally and spiritually. Then came the psalm’s turning point.
“Until I went into the sanctuary of God…”
The great ‘until’. I was relating with everything in the psalm so far, but I didn’t have my ‘until’ moment yet. You mean the wrestling stops somewhere? There’s an end to these feelings and this kind of existential spiralling? And interestingly enough, Asaph’s “until” moment didn’t come because of an intellectual epiphany or sudden understanding of life and all its meaning. It was simply a change of posture and position. He went to the sanctuary of God. He went to worship. He chose to turn to God anyway, despite all those questions and doubts and fears. And it was there that God showed him the eternal picture, that wickedness leads nowhere good, that the narrow path leads to glory. How patient God is to keep bearing with me even in my bitterness and my tantrums, I thought. And then I read it further on in the psalm…
“Then I realized that my heart was bitter, and I was all torn up inside. I was so foolish and ignorant— I must have seemed like a senseless animal to you. Yet I still belong to you; you hold my right hand.”
Yet I still belong to you. After all of this? All my anger and bitterness and desire to run away and my constant complaining, God still sees me as his own? He still holds my hand through it?
I really thought I was struggling with something new and original. I thought my questions would maybe be something nobody had asked before or would strike my friend as something shocking or “un-Christian” of me… but then I find not only is it not a new idea, it’s in the BIBLE. My guy Asaph had the exact same questions thousands of years ago, and it even made it into scripture!
It was weirdly comforting, even though I’m an artist and I want to be unique. My feelings are things that people have felt before.
I read that psalm every day for a couple of weeks, I still bring it up to people regularly. Bit by bit, I started to feel like I was reaching an ‘until’ moment.
It really just came down to surrendering my need to understand everything, and that’s not easy or a small thing at all. After 4 - 5 years of deep, painful, internal process it’s not just going to be an over-night fix. But I just started to feel the sunrise of the day. The intensity of the night season was starting to fade, and I felt permission to simply step into it.
“I think you need a break from the intensity” my sister told me at one point. She was right. The night season was necessary, and it wasn’t all for nothing. I felt like I came from it having unpacked some negative ideas and beliefs that I had kept for too long, I don’t feel the shame and self-rejection I used to feel anymore. I don’t feel plagued by the same insecurities anymore. I think that is the lightness people see. I even have more understanding and appreciation for life and death, and the fragility of it all.
Even though there’s still so much that I don’t understand yet and that I’m still healing from,, I’m just trying to go to the sanctuary of God. I’ve put my questions on the shelf for a while because quite frankly I’m tired of asking them. I’m choosing just to sit with him, to ask for his grace and mercy every day. To keep walking forward, maybe limping along, but still moving.
That’s the kind of “DAY” that I’m ready for. The pressure came off when I realised the album didn’t need to be a "everything is great now” album, but simply about choosing to press forward anyway. Maybe it’s a resilience album. I finally felt ready for these songs, and even able to write new ones for the theme. And now that it’s time to share it, I feel like my own life season has aligned with what I’m creating again.
There’s a lot of variety on the album. There are songs of dependence, like “Again & Again” and “Circles”. There are moments of realising I need to look beyond myself “What If”. There are reflections on how far I’ve come already “Remember”. There are peaceful, resolute reflections on God’s character and work in my life “My Safe Place”, “Forever & Always”, “Reprise”. And there are songs about deciding to just keep going even when you don’t understand everything “Day By Day” / “Running”.
All of that to say, my second album “DAY” is going to be released March 27th! I’ll be sharing the next song from the album “What If” this Friday (Feb 20th). Recorded with my friends in Japan, and finished off at my home studio in Manchester. I’ve never been more proud of an album. I feel like it’s the kind of music I’ve wanted to make for years, and I don’t think it would be what it is without the “NIGHT” process that preceded it. I pray it becomes a soundtrack for those trying to keep moving forwards and learning to look up and look out, even in the craziness of life.
Jonathan, thank you for sharing this incredibly timely message! So often, we think the “day” is going to arrive with a lightbulb moment, fanfare, and full healing…but it often comes in the way you describe here. Slowly, inevitably, gently, as “a long obedience in the same direction”. The way you walked us through psalm 73 was so honest and it inspired me to read it myself. Praying verse 28 over you: “But for me it is good to be near God; I have made the Lord God my refuge, that I may tell of all your works.” Thank you for telling of his works here in substack and in your music! You’re doing it!!
I just read Psalm 73 this morning, and I had the same thoughts. I was thinking about how our eyes are focused on things that don’t last instead of on eternal things.
I’ve gone through grief recently, and I know how hard it is to let go of that desperate pain and think about anything else. I went through a time of understanding and figuring out many things, as if I were trying to put it all together, like organizing a room. But our hearts are not rooms; they’re alive—feeling and changing as circumstances change. It’s okay to take some time to “digest” everything you’ve been through, but we can do this as we keep moving forward.
After that moment of intense grief, going back to my routine helped me heal. I knew I wasn’t going to heal myself with my own strength by trying to put everything together; time was going to do that for me while I was learning the “whys” and how to stand in the storm with God, noticing the power of the Bible and, specifically, prayer.
I just want to thank you, Jonathan, for the post and for the album “NIGHT.” It feels like you’re a distant friend of mine. God bless you always. I’ve been praying for you, and I’ll keep praying. I hope you get through this with your relationship with God even stronger.