The Call To Tell Hard Stories

In a recent January Series talk, Tom Medema, a Calvin University graduate who spent decades serving with the U.S. National Park Service, invited listeners to reflect on national parks as far more than scenic destinations. He described them as places of memory, learning, and formation, spaces that hold the stories that shape who we are and who we are becoming.

Many of us think first of breathtaking beauty: the granite cliffs and waterfalls of Yosemite National Park, or the sweeping mountain landscapes of Banff National Park in Canada. These places rightly inspire awe. They point us toward the grandeur of creation and our smallness within it. But Tom reminded us that these landscapes also carry hard stories: Stories that are essential if we are serious about truth, justice, and reconciliation.

Yosemite’s beauty exists alongside a history of Indigenous displacement and exclusion from land that had been stewarded for generations. Banff, Canada’s oldest national park, was established through the forced removal of Indigenous peoples and laws that criminalized their presence on their own land. These parks preserve not only natural beauty, but also the complicated realities of colonialism, power, and loss.

As Christians, this way of holding beauty and brokenness together should feel familiar. The Bible never edits out its hardest chapters. Scripture tells the truth about exile, violence, idolatry, injustice, and communal failure. Israel’s story includes lament alongside covenant. The Gospels do not rush past the cross on the way to resurrection. Formation comes not from denial, but from faithful reckoning.

If we are willing to sit with the hard stories of Scripture, we should also be willing to sit with the hard stories embedded in our national histories and the places we love.

This matters deeply for churches in both the United States and in Canada. National parks are often called our largest classrooms. In many ways, churches are classrooms too: Places where people learn how to tell the truth, how to repent, how to hope, and how to live together faithfully.

Reflection questions for churches and faith communities

What stories are we willing to tell and which ones do we avoid?
In Scripture, God’s people are formed through remembering both faithfulness and failure. What happens when churches model that same honesty about our national and local histories?

How does our Christian story shape how others experience our faith?
The stories we tell and refuse to tell don’t just shape us internally. They affect how others perceive Christianity itself. When churches ignore injustice, gloss over harm, or resist hard truths, people often experience faith as defensive or untrustworthy. When churches tell the truth with humility, people encounter a faith that can be trusted to face reality.

Do our spaces invite listening, or only affirmation?
National parks invite visitors to slow down, observe, and listen to the land. Do our congregations make space for listening to Scripture, to history, to those who have been harmed, to voices different from our own?

How might creation deepen our discipleship?
Time spent in places like Yosemite or Banff can cultivate humility, awe, and attentiveness. How might churches encourage engagement with creation not as escape, but as spiritual formation that shapes how we live with one another?

What does faithful remembrance look like in practice?
Remembering well can lead to lament, repentance, and repair. It can also lead to deeper gratitude and more honest celebration. What practices, such as prayer, education, worship, or storytelling, could help your community remember more faithfully?

A more perfect union, both a national union and the union that holds us together in our Reformed denomination and in the body of Christ at large, is not built by forgetting the past. It is shaped through truth-telling, shared memory, and hope rooted in God’s ongoing work of restoration. When churches model this kind of faithfulness, they not only deepen their own discipleship; they offer the wider world a glimpse of a faith that is honest, humble, and alive with hope.