AMY TURNER

On 8th Street in Sapulpa, Oklahoma, there’s a little church called Pentecostal Mission where three boys grew up learning about Jesus, and about harmony. Jonathan Thompson, Ivan and Byron came up singing together in that building before life pulled them in different directions. Careers, families, distance. The kind of things that quietly end a lot of groups before they even start.

But in early 2017, something brought them back. They found themselves standing next to each other again, singing the same songs they’d grown up on, and the group that would become 8th Street was born from that reunion, named for the road that led them to church as kids.

Their latest single, “Here Comes The Promise,” carries that same thread of return, of finding your way back to something solid when life gets heavy. Thompson wrote the song, and he says the meaning isn’t buried too deep.

“The second verse of this song kind of goes more into letting everybody know that we’ve all been there,” Thompson explains. He’s talking about the moments that knock people sideways, the ones that feel unmanageable in the middle of them. “We’ve all had those things in our lives that come up that just feel like something we can’t handle.”

The verse he’s describing speaks to a friend caught in a struggle, unsure what to do, trying to carry it alone. It’s a scenario Thompson knows from the inside. “I’ve been there,” he says. “I’ve done that.” He admits there’s something almost stubborn in how people, himself included, keep reaching for their own solutions. “Sometimes I don’t know why, when we’ve got an almighty God, that we just want to try to do it our way.”

The answer the song offers is simple, and it’s the whole point of the title. Cast your cares on the master, it says.

“That’s exactly what we need to do,” Thompson says, “because I think when we do that, we just feel those arms encircle us, and we know that he is there for us, and those promises are going to come through.”

That sense of promise fulfilled isn’t just a lyric for 8th Street. It’s the arc of the group itself: three friends from a small church on a small street, who walked away and found their way back to the same harmony they started with.