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Turning Our Stories into Song: Seminarian Sarah Krolak's Ministry Project
In February, then Holy Trinity Seminarian Sarah Krolak started her ministry project at HTLoop. In a variety of different interactive formats, she collected stories from the community about the things that matter to us and how we see God in the world. She then used those stories to write this offertory song! And since it can't be sung in person (yet!), she recorded it! This morning the song was debuted in Holy Trinity’s online worship.
Good morning! My name is Sarah Krolak and I was a ministry in context seminarian at Holy Trinity last year. I was primarily at the Loop but you may have seen me at the Lakeview site a few times as well.
My spring project last semester was to write an offertory song using some of the words and stories I collected from the Holy Trinity community. The story gathering process started at the end of February with conversation during a forum at the Loop. And then I put questions on posters in the reception space for people to write on, I made a Google form, and when we went online, I posted questions in the Holy Trinity community Facebook group.
Once I had a plethora of responses, I read through them all a million times and let them simmer for a while. Then I compiled them all onto a single piece of paper and looked through them to find recurring experiences and themes. It was next to impossible to find words that would fully encompass everything that you shared, but the thread that connected every single one of your responses was God’s presence in our lives, so this became the central focus of the song: God is here.
From there, I narrowed it down to a few different spaces where you’re especially aware of God’s presence, and these became the verses.
-God is present in the city, in Chicago. In the people here.
-God is present in nature, there were a lot of specific examples for this one!
-God is present in life passages and community. Weddings. Baptisms. Moving and transitions. Funerals. The family of God holding each other through it all.
-And God is present in Holy Communion.
God is here! God is here all around us, God has given us all these things, and we are called into the world to share this abundance with others.
I am so excited to finally share this song with you today! Since we aren’t able to debut it in person yet, I recorded it for you. I hope you are able to hear some of your stories reflected in this song. Thank you for sharing them with me and for letting me write a song that lifts all these things up to God.