Fully Seen
She pulled the album from a shelf the way people retrieve things they’ve been waiting to show someone.
Not casually, not incidentally, but with the deliberateness of someone who has kept something safe for a long time and finally found the right audience.
My grandmother had been a Vegas showgirl.
I didn’t know this until I met her, which happened later than it should have, the way family connections sometimes do: too late, too briefly, with the grief of realizing you’ve found someone remarkable just as you’re about to lose them. She was in her 90’s when we finally sat together in her living room, and she moved through the space with a quality I can only describe as someone who had once been looked at and knew it, who had inhabited her body as something worth presenting to the world and still carried that knowledge even as the body itself changed.
The album she handed me was full of her prime. Photographs from an era when Las Vegas was a different city, when showgirls were considered a particular kind of art form, when a woman who looked like her in feathers and sequins and the confidence of someone completely at home in her own skin was something people paid to witness.
She looked exactly like me.
Not just the face. The way she held herself, the particular tilt of her chin, something about the set of her shoulders that I recognized from my own mirror in a way I hadn’t expected. She was probably my age in those photographs. Maybe younger. And she beamed showing them to me, not with the embarrassment of someone sharing something they half-regret, but with the unambiguous pride of someone showing you their best work.
She died not long after we met. I didn’t know her well enough to grieve her the way she deserved. But I remember that album, and I remember that beam, and I remember thinking: I want to look at photographs of myself someday and feel that way about them.
What I Did and Why.
I had photographs taken recently. Not for anyone else. Not to post, not to share, not to perform for an audience or invite anyone’s opinion about my body or my choices. Just for me, to document who I was at this particular moment in my life so that someday I might pull them out and beam the way my grandmother beamed.
This is considered taboo in Christian circles. I know this. I’ve been in Christian circles long enough to know exactly which assumptions will be made, which concerns will be raised, which verses will be cited.
But I want to sit with the taboo honestly rather than pretend it doesn’t exist, and I want to examine it from both directions. Not to reach a conclusion about what everyone should do, but to think carefully about what faithfulness actually requires here versus what cultural discomfort has dressed up in theological language.
The Case for Caution.
I’ll start with the concerns because they deserve fair representation and because dismissing them entirely would be intellectually dishonest.
Paul instructs the Corinthians that their bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, purchased at a price, and that they should therefore glorify God in their bodies (1 Corinthians 6:19-20). This isn’t peripheral instruction. It’s foundational claim about what the body means for Christians, about the relationship between physical and spiritual life.
Peter instructs women toward inner beauty, the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, rather than outward adornment (1 Peter 3:3-4). The instruction suggests that Christian women should be cautious about how much investment goes toward physical presentation versus interior formation.
These are real scriptural concerns. Not fabricated prudishness, not arbitrary cultural discomfort dressed up as theology. There’s genuine biblical warrant for asking hard questions about how we treat the body, what we’re communicating through physical presentation, whether our relationship to our own image is ordered toward God or toward something else.
The concern about photographs specifically is about what they do. Who might see them, what might be communicated, whether creating them represents investment in the kind of physical self-presentation that Scripture seems to caution against. These are questions worth taking seriously.
The Case for a Different Reading
And yet.
The body throughout Scripture is not primarily source of shame or danger but of goodness. God created it, called it good, became flesh himself in a claim about embodiment that Christianity has never fully integrated. The Incarnation is a kind of biblical scandal: not that God condescended to take on human form reluctantly, but that flesh itself is appropriate habitation for divinity.
The Song of Solomon exists in the canon. This is worth pausing on. A book that describes human physical beauty with explicit detail, that celebrates the beloved’s body with unambiguous delight, that treats embodied desire as something worth writing poetry about. We tend to allegorize it into domesticated spiritual metaphor and move on, because taking it seriously at face value requires reckoning with a God who apparently doesn’t find the physical beauty of human beings embarrassing or inappropriate as subject matter.
Psalm 139 describes the body as fearfully and wonderfully made, knit together by God in the womb, remarkable in its construction. This isn’t reluctant acknowledgment that bodies exist despite their inconvenient tendency toward sin. This is praise for embodied existence as something God made and cares about and is present in.
The question isn’t whether the body matters to God. Clearly it does. The question is what honoring that mattering actually looks like.
What This Isn’t
I want to be clear about something because the clarity matters: this has never been rebellion.
I’ve never had a rebellious streak. Not one. I’ve followed Christ sincerely since my youth, lived a life that people who know me would describe as upright, held convictions that sometimes made me the outlier in rooms where the easier path would have been to go along with what everyone else was doing.
I’m not doing this because I’m pushing back against God or against Christian community or against anyone’s expectations of me. I feel no conviction about it. Not the quiet kind, not the buried kind, not the kind that gets rationalized away through theological gymnastics. Just the honest absence of the sense that I’ve done something wrong.
This matters because conviction is real data. When the Spirit produces it, it’s worth attending to, worth examining seriously, worth letting it change your behavior. I take conviction seriously precisely because I’ve felt it about other things in my life and know the difference between genuine moral concern and other people’s discomfort projected onto me as if it were divine instruction.
The absence of conviction here isn’t spiritual immaturity or willful blindness. It’s mere information.
My grandmother didn’t seem to spend her last years haunted by those photographs.
She seemed to cherish them. To be grateful that documentation existed of that particular season of her life, that she could hold it in her hands and show it to her granddaughter and say: this was me. This was real. This happened.
There’s something in that worth taking seriously. The photographs weren’t for other people in the way I think Christian concern about them assumes they are. They were record of herself, evidence of existence at a particular moment, documentation that she had been young and beautiful and fully alive in her body and that those facts were worth preserving.
I think about her often now. This woman I barely knew but recognized immediately in the marrow-level way you recognize people who share your face. I think about the album and the beam and the pride of someone showing you work they’re not ashamed of.
I don’t know what she believed about God. I know she died not long after we met and I hope I see her again somewhere and have more time to ask. But I know she gave me something in that afternoon: permission to see my own body as something worth documenting, worth preserving, worth looking at without shame.
The body is for resurrection.
This is Paul’s argument in 1 Corinthians 15: that the resurrection of Christ establishes the resurrection of believers, and that this means the body matters in ways that Platonic dismissal of physical existence can’t accommodate. We are not souls temporarily imprisoned in inconvenient flesh. We are embodied creatures whose embodiment is part of what God is redeeming.
This means the body is worth paying attention to. Worth caring for, worth seeing clearly, worth documenting at various points in its journey as evidence of what God made and what time does to it and what it means to inhabit flesh that is simultaneously finite and destined for resurrection.
I’m not making a theological argument for any particular type of photograph. I’m resisting the assumption that Christian faithfulness requires treating the body as primarily source of danger, as something to be covered and minimized and never examined too closely because examination leads inevitably to sin.
The body is temple of the Holy Spirit, yes. But temples are meant to be beautiful. Temples are designed with attention and care and investment in making visible something worthy of reverence. The instruction isn’t to apologize for having a body but to understand its significance, to treat it with the seriousness appropriate to something the Holy Spirit dwells in.
What I’m Keeping
The photographs are for me. For some future version of myself who needs evidence that she was here, that she existed in this body at this time, that she was fully alive in the middle of a season that tried very hard to convince her she was disappearing.
Maybe I’ll show them to a granddaughter someday. Maybe she’ll recognize her own face in mine the way I recognized mine in my grandmother’s. Maybe I’ll beam the way my grandmother beamed, not with the defiance of someone who got away with something but with the simple pride of someone who documented herself honestly and isn’t sorry.
I don’t think God is sorry either. I don’t think He sees these photographs and grieves. I think He sees a woman He knit together in the womb, fearfully and wonderfully made, trying to see herself clearly without shame……which is harder than it sounds after the specific years I’ve had.
I think He understands why my grandmother’s album mattered to me. Why seeing her face in mine mattered. Why wanting evidence of this particular season, this particular body, this particular moment of being alive felt important enough to do.
Not rebellion. Not performance. Not invitation for anyone else’s opinion about what my faithfulness should look like.
Just a woman, and a camera, and the body God gave her, and the hope that someday she’ll pull these out and beam.
