Rick Guidotti had been trained to see and capture a very particular standard of physical beauty. But walking down New York City's Park Avenue one day, the fashion photographer spotted a girl with albinism. Though her fair skin and white hair fell outside the familiar window of beauty, he saw her with new eyes.

Guidotti's shift in seeing—the same kind of "aha!" as when a scientific discovery or a forgotten name suddenly bursts forth—is what professor James Loder calls "convictional knowing." In that moment, recognizing the girl's inherent beauty, Guidotti didn't see disability or deformity. He saw humanity.

Guidotti, whose client list includes Yves Saint Laurent, Elle, and L'Oreal, insists that this out-of-the-box beauty isn't "inner beauty." "I don't believe in that," he explained recently to Bloom, a magazine for parents of children with disabilities. "I'm as shallow as it gets. These kids are gorgeous; we're just not allowed to see it."

Driven by this new way of seeing, Guidotti launched Positive Exposure, an arts organization that photographs children with various genetic differences. Guidotti described to Bloom the first young woman he photographed: "Even though she was stunning, gorgeous, she walked in with her shoulders hunched, her head down, no eye contact. She had zero self-esteem. But then photographing her and showing her her magnificence, like 'Look at yourself!' I watched her transform in front of the lens. And it happens every time."

Guidotti's telling of the first photo shoot resonated with another story I heard recently, one into which my own life is being woven. Last month a few friends from Durham, North Carolina, and I visited Friendship House in Holland, Michigan. The first of its kind, Friendship House is an apartment-style home for adult residents with disabilities who share living space with grad students at Western Theological Seminary. The testimony we heard from residents, students, and parents was univocal: Though some residents were in some ways underdeveloped when they moved to Friendship House, the growth they've experienced over the past several years is nothing less than remarkable. The growth came from being seen by others through a holy lens. When they were recognized as beloved individuals who bear God's image, and afforded the freedoms and responsibilities which that reality entails, they blossomed.

The work of Positive Exposure and Friendship House brought to mind Jesus' teaching that the eyes are the lamp of the body. The image was once confusing to me, as if Jesus were saying that light could come out of the eyes, like robot laser-beams. Jesus seemed to be insisting that a certain type of seeing could bring light to darkness. The lens of Rick Guidotti's camera—a tool so often wielded to distort the imperfect reality of human bodies—is an "eye" like that. Through Positive Exposure, the "eye" itself bears light. In fact, by illumining the humanity of his subjects, Guidotti's camera affords others a glimpse of the beauty that is more true about individuals with genetic differences than the differences themselves. The lie of worth-less-ness, which too often swirls around our friends, is dispelled when they are seen as they really are.

This is why Susan, Ramona, and I traveled to Holland, Michigan. Over the next 12 months, a number of folks in our community—knit together by the relationships we've developed through Reality Ministries, a ministry to teens who've been marginalized in different ways—will be moving into a local neighborhood with friends and family members with intellectual and physical disabilities. God willing, our community will be the world's second Friendship House, alongside the other friends with disabilities who are already knit into the fabric of the neighborhood.

I am a visual artist, and before my eyes were opened, I saw differently. The visual clues I took in—sizes and shapes and colors and forms and movements—sent impulses to my brain that registered simply as "small microcephalic head" or "elongated hydrocephalic head." Instead of seeing those who bear God's image, I saw, as many do, "wheelchair" and "prosthetic limb" and "unstable gait."

But the gospel has changed the way I see. I know this because I retain a faint, fading memory that when I met one of my friends six years ago, his head struck me as disproportionately long, enough to make me uncomfortable. Today, my eyes aren't able to register it as unusual at all.

There is a new hot mobile app that rates any digital photo of a human face based on attractiveness. Brad Pitt scores a 91. Beyonce gets a 92. Poor Oprah scores only 42. Some of Giudotti's subjects would dip far lower. I assume the app uses some matrix that measures demonstrably pleasing proportions and shapes. In a world like this, I'm not naïve enough to believe that the mysterious gospel reality about eyes-that-illumine is compelling enough to change our culture's impossible standards of physical beauty anytime soon. Whatever logarithm woven into our deep places—the one that releases soothing chemicals in our brains at the sight of Beyonce, and anxiety-producing ones when we see a tragically misshapen face—will continue to propel most of us. Some of us, though, like Giudotti, and like some of my friends in Durham, will be drawn to a less recognizable but truer form of authentic physical beauty.

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