Years ago Trevor Hudson, a South African preacher, invited some North American Christians to consider how we build stories, how we choose some elements out of countless events and possibilities as markers to frame the story we will tell ourselves and the world over and over again.

In a world full of faulty, silenced, and damaging stories, we are invited to repair—to make whole the stories by considering the pieces left out, unheard, or unexamined. As the psalmist asks questions of the waters and the hills, we can ask a few questions.

What if we soften our defenses, our sense of already knowing the answers, our fear of doing something wrong, and open our caring curiosity?

What if we open ourselves to a strange language? Perhaps the language is strange because it has unfamiliar sounds or an unfamiliar alphabet. Perhaps the language is strange because the perspective of the story is framed by the ways skin color, culture, gender, or access to food and health affect history and the way events play out. Or perhaps the language is strange because we have little practice listening to the voice, the story of rock, sea, earth, and sky. Our biblical faith ancestors testify to nonhuman creation telling a story of God and responding to or becoming part of the story of human pain and ignorance.

What if we patiently listened for the strange language to become intelligible? We might sense all of creation as “all our relations,”*—part of the body of God. How might this begin the repair of the story, to create a hospitality space that could become a holy refuge or a sanctuary for God?

*Translation of the Lakota phrase “Mitakuye Oyasin”