Church Clothes

Grace Whitfield, seventeen, keeps her faith the way she keeps her Sundays: ironed, laid out in order, and ready before the house is awake — worship-team hoodie by the door, prayers composed in complete sentences since she was twelve. Then February comes: her father loses his job, the family's careful arithmetic stops adding up, and the church clothes that made her look like she had it all together become the hardest thing she owns to wear. A deposit stretches unpaid into March, help arrives in forms she keeps politely refusing, and one morning Grace finds she is too tired to perform one more finished prayer — and has to learn what a small, true one sounds like. At the corner booth in Mabel's Diner, her five friends are carrying hard months of their own, and Grace begins to learn that being loved was never the same as looking faithful. Church Clothes is a Christian young adult novel about performed faith, family pressure, and learning to rejoice when the fields yield nothing, rooted in Habakkuk 3:17–18 — Book Six of The Corner Booth series.