Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church

by Rachel Held Evans

If the church is like a body, like a bride, then perhaps we ought to take her through what Barbara Brown Taylor calls the “spiritual practice of wearing skin”: Whether you are sick or well, lovely or irregular, there comes a time when it is vitally important to your spiritual health to drop your clothes, look in the mirror, and say, “Here I am. This is the body-like-no-other that my life has shaped. I live here. This is my soul’s address.” After you have taken a good look around, you may decide that there is a lot to be thankful for, all things considered. Bodies take real beatings. That they heal from most things is an underrated miracle. That they give birth is beyond reckoning.91 “When I do this,” she says, “I generally decide that it is time to do a better job of wearing my skin with gratitude instead of loathing.”