Church Shoes

Now playing: It Don't Matter to the Sun by Rosie Thomas | Captured by Mitchell Royel

The polished leather caught the light differently each Sunday, but I couldn’t see beauty—only embarrassment. I’d hide my church shoes in a canvas bag until the last possible moment before entering the sanctuary. Something about their deliberate formality felt like wearing my outsider status for all to see.

It doesn’t matter to the sun how we dress beneath its light. The universe continues its indifferent rotations regardless of our human ceremonies. Yet there I was, Sunday after Sunday, painfully aware of every creak and click those shoes made against the wooden floors.

Those shoes marked a boundary between worlds. Between the person I was becoming Monday through Saturday and the tradition I was born into. Each step a reminder of belonging to something I hadn’t chosen. I’d kick them off the moment I returned home, as if they carried the weight of expectation in their soles.

Faith isn’t about footwear—I know this now. But adolescence has its own logic, and mine had decided that rebellion began at the ankles.

Years passed this way until I found my voice through music. Creating songs required a vulnerability I’d been avoiding. It demanded an authenticity that recognized rather than rejected my origins. The first time I performed my own composition, I wore those church shoes deliberately—a reconciliation between my present and past.

Making music taught me that transformation doesn’t require abandonment. Those patent leather reminders weren’t symbols of conformity but continuity—a thread connecting who I was to who I was becoming. The same shoes that once felt like shackles became grounding points.

My songs began incorporating the very cadences I’d absorbed during those Sundays spent shifting uncomfortably in the pews. The rhythms of tradition finding new expression through my reluctant voice. What once felt like restriction became resource.

Now I understand that some journeys require proper shoes. That returning to origins isn’t regression but recognition. That the path to authenticity sometimes leads through the very doors we once couldn’t wait to exit.

True devotion appears in leather worn thin at the knees—whether in prayer or in performance. The shoes remain the same. It’s my understanding of them that changed.

-Mitchell Royel