When we started singing together, it was because we needed to sing.

We had, each of us, been through some really rough stuff lately. Stuff that made us feel alone, and unappreciated, and unworthy. Stuff that made us angry at the church, and angry at God. They were childish, selfish feelings—but they were real. The kind of feelings you talk about quietly, in late-night telephone conversations or at back-corner tables over refilled cups of coffee, and only with the best old friends.

It was through a series of those conversations, actually, that 3.12 was born. We’d be talking, two of us, about the “stuff” in our lives, and we’d reach that point where you run out of words and your eyes focus elsewhere. Then, after a few breaths, one of us would sigh, and say with quiet wistfulness, “I miss singing with you.”

We shared a lot of memories between the three of us—not all of them happy. But through it all—sometimes in spite of it all—our song was there, the still point at the center of a spinning world, to remind us that God is good.

So we found a spare hour at the end of a busy day in the middle of a busy week, and we gathered in the recital hall at the college where David teaches. And we sang.

We sang for us. We sang because we needed to hear the songs. And the best way for us to hear them was to sing them—to breathe them deeply into our lungs, wrap our muscles around them, and offer them back to the space around us. We sang to change ourselves. We sang because to keep silent would have been to surrender to something less than hope.

And once we discovered that—once we realized that singing gave us hope, even in a borrowed hour during a frantic week—we knew we had to share it. We knew that the gifts God gives flourish and thrive only when they’re shared. And we knew that our song was a gift.

Our group name (discovered only after a lengthy period of introspection, prayer, and study) is a reference to the biblical book of Second Corinthians—chapter 3, verse 12 of that book says that “Because we have great hope, so we act with great boldness.”

May our ministry always live up to that calling.